


Swan Lake

by LHNameless



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Art, Ballet, Ballet Dancer Harry Styles, Ballet Dancer Louis, Bottom Harry, Bottom Louis, Canon LGBTQ Character, Comedy, Dirty Dancing, Disability, Disabled Character, Engagement, Escapade, Falling In Love, Female Character of Color, Foreshadowing, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, LHNameless, Louis has Mickey Mouse plasters, Love, M/M, Male Character of Color, Mental Health Issues, Physical Disability, Romance, Swan Lake - Freeform, Top Harry, Top Louis, Tragedy, couple dancing, harry and Louis on the moors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-03-04 02:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 50,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13354134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LHNameless/pseuds/LHNameless
Summary: Larry Ballet AU.*Children are not their parents' tools, but Louis was his mothers'. Disabled people can't do what other people can, but Harry could do more.Harry Styles is the King of Ballet, Louis is the boy with Mickey Mouse plasters, but they are to become dance partners all the same, and they are to dance Swan Lake at Christmas.But will they make it to December?*3rd person narration. The story is complete.Warning: This story contains horror, violence, and death. Trigger warnings may apply. As the author, I do not advise this book for readers under the age of sixteen.





	1. Arabesque

He was not anything special—in my eyes at least—perhaps a little self-obsessed, a little bit temperamental at times, but he was nothing to make you stop and stare.  
But the spotlight hit him in that dark arena, blinding, captivating, and I saw in that moment why everyone called him the "King of Ballet".

It was not a gift that he had, but if, for argument's sake, we were all moths, he'd be a butterfly. When he danced on that stage, the world couldn't help but stop and watch every movement of his body with their mouths open in amazement. He was tall, and beneath his clothes, his muscles showed. He had deep brown curls that tumbled down his back and a vicious stare in those green eyes. He knew his moves as if they came as easily as breathing. He knew his body like he knew his own name. He let the music become a part of him, a part of his heart. There was no doubt about it, that he was the most beautiful thing in the room.

And he was to be my dance partner.

You see, dear Diary, it all started like this, in a situation where I was late. I am always terribly, terribly _late_.

*

Louis grabbed his bag from the backseat of the car, turning around so fast that the cup of hot chocolate which had been resting on the dashboard spilt and drizzled onto his jeans. He shouted, perhaps a little too loudly as a few students turned their heads to him from the courtyard.

"See, this is why you need to wake up earlier." Zayn said, picking up the empty cup and sighing when he saw the state of his car. Zayn was Louis' driver, or more accurately, the rich husband of Louis' primary school teacher, but he also acted as a personal chauffeur. He was the sort to make mothers with children back away. One of those people with tattoos over every inch of their body but their face, and he was one of those who did not look as if he'd be associated with an excitable schoolboy called Louis.

And yet, here he was, watching Louis scramble out of the car and drop all of his books into the only puddle in sight. "See you later, Louis." He said, shaking his head and laughing to himself. Louis looked up from his books as if to say, 'why does this only happen to me'. Zayn smiled, rolled the window up, and drove away.

He watched Louis out of the rearview mirror. The boy hadn't brushed his hair, and those chestnut strands were a complete mess today. His shirt was buttoned wrong, his tie was lopsided, and it did not come as a surprise to Zayn when he watched another car roll through the puddle and splash Louis with mud. Zayn could perhaps feel empathy for him, for the fact that he was a walking disaster, but he knew that Louis—if given the chance—wouldn't change for the world. He was happy, he'd always been happy, and he always would be happy.

At least, that was how it was supposed to be. But life isn't quite fair.

*

"Let go of me!" Louis shouted as he was shoved onto a row of yellow lockers that all clanged when his back hit them. He yelped as a padlock was smashed into his spine, but he quickly forgot the pain when a thick arm pinned him down by the chest. He opened his blue eyes and a very ugly bulldog grimaced back at him. Ah, not a bulldog, but a human thing that went by the name of Shawn. In any case, he had a face like a bulldog, and his breath smelt as bad.

"Let me go, it hurts!" Louis said again, struggling against a grasp that he knew would win him over. He could feel people staring, but he could feel the slight pain in his heart more when he realised that not one of those people was willing to help a brat like him.

"What's this?" Shawn said, spitting on Louis' face as his teeth were bucked. He had a lisp and crossed eyes, and if he were in Harry Potter, he'd probably be the ugly cousin of the Weasely's. "Is this you?" He asked, loosening his grip of Louis' chest to show him a sheet of paper with the words "Ballet Applicant" at the top of it in pink letters.

"No, Shawn." Louis said, finally able to push Shawn's hairy arm away from his chest. "That is a piece of paper. I am not a piece of paper. I am a Louis." He spoke slowly, as he felt as if Shawn didn't understand much.

As if proof to his theory, Shawn blinked at him for a few moments until he finally had the brains to get angry again and shove Louis back against the locker. "Listen, dipshit, this is you on here." He said, flailing the sheet around, "Why did you sign up for the _ballet_? As if you could ever dance. You can't even stand on your own two feet without tripping up."

Louis opened his mouth, his eyes watering from the tight grip on his chest, "I can try.." He said, coughing, "What's it got to do with you, anyway?"

Shawn grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him twice against the locker. This time, Louis felt those tears escape and run down his face. He looked down. "Leave me alone." He said, "I may be clumsy, but I can try."

He looked up and pushed Shawn so hard that he even surprised himself when the boy stumbled back. He began to walk off, trailing his bag behind him, but Shawn called his name, "Oi, dipshit." He said. Louis stopped. "Let's make a deal. At the ballet show, dance without falling once, and I won't come near you for a whole two months." and under his breath, he added, "That'll get rid of those bruises of yours.. I didn't realise that I'd made so many.."

Louis didn't turn around, but he stood there for a few moments, and finally, he said, "Two whole months? You promise?"

Shawn smiled, "Promise."

It may have seemed foolhardy to accept such a deal, but Louis nodded without hesitation. He did not have any faith in himself; he knew that even a lifetime of dancing wouldn't save him from his clumsiness, but the thought of not being pushed into a locker, or humiliated in front of his friends, or having his head shoved into a toilet was all rather nice to think about. Even if the bruises on his body wouldn't leave and they'd continue to return over and over again, at least he could have a place of comfort, and he needed a place like that, because he was sure that he'd lose his mind soon.

*

 


	2. Brisé

Rain fell fast and heavily that day. It had not rained in a week, and the sun had been scorching hot. It had been so hot, in fact, that Louis couldn’t even go outside without melting away to a pile of Lou-goo. He couldn’t imagine it being so warm now, and he was shivering. A bird sat in the tree nearby—a starling—and it sung despite the rain. Louis stayed still as he watched old Mrs Morrison walk past his garden and down the road with her purple anorak and over-weight dog. He didn’t want her to see him, he didn’t want her to see the purple bruise on his cheek, nor did he want her to hear the cracking of another beer bottle opening in the kitchen.

When Mrs Morrison had vanished down the road to return to her loving husband, Louis suddenly felt very alone in the world. Very alone, and very scared. He sat up in the crooked chair by the windowsill and looked to his left. The living room door was open, the corridor with the pealing wallpaper beyond that—dark, and on the other side of it was the kitchen. And in the kitchen was his mother. Louis had never had a father, or at least, one that would stay for longer than just the night, but he’d never wanted one. He just couldn’t imagine how terrible of a person he’d be if he were to wish anyone to live with this _mother_ of his. She had not left the house since Louis was fourteen, and that was two and a half years ago. He was now seventeen, would be eighteen in December, and he knew that if he didn’t escape by that day, then he’d be trapped with her in this shabby little appartment forever.

“Louis? Darling, where are you?”

Louis leant back in the chair, his hands grasping the sides of it as if letting it go would end him in some terrible fate. He heard footsteps in the kitchen, and then he saw her shadow move across the walls until she poked her head around the doorway. She smiled, beer bottle in hand. “Ah, there you are. I thought you’d ran away again. Good boy.” She walked up to him, and Louis froze when her hand ruffled his hair. She kissed him on his forehead. “You won’t run away again, will you?”

Louis looked up at her but felt as if staring into those blue eyes was a mistake of which he did not want to face the consequences of. “I never ran away, mother.” He said, bowing his head respectfully, “I went to school. I always go to school. I have told you this.”

“School?” She repeated, seeming to have heard brand new information. Louis could tell she was smiling at him, “Is it nice there?”

He looked at her. He had her eyes, forget-me-not blue, and both pairs had seen terrible things. The smile on his Mother’s face was slowly vanishing, turning into a scowl that her son had seen too many times before.

She grabbed Louis by the hair and yanked him up. He was not as tall as her, and he struggled to keep his feet on the ground. It hurt. She hurt. “Did you forget about mother?” she growled, and the way that her voice wheezed was terrifying, “You think that you can just walk out of here with your so-called friends, and leave me? Is that how you treat your mother?”

Louis tugged on the sleeve of her dress—the one that she’d been wearing for the past two weeks—and she let him go. Louis tumbled to the ground, his head aching, his knees scratched from the uneven floorboards. He did not cry, and the tears that did leave his eyes were from pain, nothing more. He did not see the point of crying, surely because he had seen too much of it over his time, and he had learnt that weakness is punished.

And if one thing was sure in that small and sad world where Louis Tomlinson lived, was thathe may have been foolish, unloved, disgusting, and every other word that had replaced his own name, but _Hell—_ he was not weak.

He looked at his knees. They were bleeding. “I am not your tool.” He said, but did not move. “I am not something for you to kick aside when you feel like it, but call back when you’re alone. Children are not their parents’ tools.”

He stood up, backed away from her, and with that stare burning into him, he walked around his mother and up the creaking stairs. Half way, he heard her scream, then glass smashed against a wall, and then there was a thud, and he new that his mother had fallen to the ground. He ran up the stairs, into his bedroom, and it was only when he turned the key in the lock that he saw how much his hands were shaking and how his heart seemed to be in his throat.

He listened to his Mother, unable to believe that he had done such a thing. The fear of the consequences were overwhelming; he didn’t know if he’d get slapped, strangled, hit over the head with a bottle, pushed down the stairs.. There were many things that could happen, but as for now, the door was locked.

He sighed and turned around. He looked at his bedroom for a while, his mind somewhere else but he wasn’t sure where. His room, as expected, was tiny, with navy blue walls and a carpet that had once been cream but was now stained and dirty. His bed was to the right, broken and too small for him, beside it was a chipped bedside table, then an old desk, and beside the window on the opposite wall from him was a mirror. He had no other furniture in his room—no wardrobe or chairs—and yet he did not have many clothes to put away, and they were all folded in the corner of his bedroom beneath the cracked mirror. He walked up to it. There was a horrible breeze coming from the window, and Louis put his hands out to close it, but then noticed that it was not open, and the draught came from a large crack in one of the windowpanes. Mother had been in his bedroom again.

He sighed and looked at his cheek in the mirror. He had great skin, people would always tell him that, but they’d also ask why he always bandaged his neck or stuck mickey mouse Elastoplast plasters on his face. This large purple mark was the reason.

“Ow..” Louis said when he stuck a plaster over it. He turned to his knees and stuck two of the largest mickey mouse plasters that he could find over them. One of them was red with black spots, the other was with Mickey’s face. Louis smiled a little bit—the plasters made him a little happier, and he’d spent all of his pocket money on the nicest and brightest ones.He stood back up, pulled his shorts up, his tee-shirt down, and then looked at himself a little longer.

He was small, perhaps a little too small for his age, very light, and very malnourished. On weekends, he would get one meal a day, and that meal would be a sandwich. Sometimes, when Mother slept, he could sneak down and steal a cereal bar from the cupboard, but he feared to do so ever since she had caught him.

He looked tired, as well, but perhaps that was because his clothes were far too big for him and looked like pyjamas, and his hair was a complete mess again. He turned away from himself, deciding that there were better things to look at, and his gaze rested on the only things that distinguished his room from a prison cell.

Posters lined the walls, pictures, quotes scribbled onto scraps of old paper. The posters were of dancers, the pictures were of the Royal Ballet shows, and the quotes were ones to remind him that he could do anything if he put his heart into it. Above his bed was his favourite poster, a huge one that he’d found in an old magazine, with the words “Swan Lake, the new beginning.” written on it, and above that was a photograph of a ballet dancer’s feet, except that one of the feet was a prosthetic. Beneath the title in the cursive writing, there was a featured name, and that name said, ‘The King of Ballet’.

The Ballet show was advertised for the upcoming winter, and Louis—despite knowing that there was no possible way that he could go—had imagined himself over and over and over again on the stage. And he’d wondered over and over and over again who this King of Ballet was.

He put his arms out in front of him, pointed his fingers like the Ballet dancers pointed theirs, and he put his foot out in front of him. He pulled his back straight, and then looked ahead. And then, moving his foot back around, he hopped in the air, and slipped on the carpet, and fell.

He landed with a thump and a quiet “Ouch,” and mother began to shout again.

“Louis, my dear?” She shouted up the stairs. Her voice—wheezing and hollow—slurred. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”

Louis froze, but she did not come up the stairs, “No, mother.” He said back, his eyes watering from the scratch that he’d got from the floorboards downstairs. He could hear the creaking of the floor and new that his mother was waiting for something, “I love you.” He said, but those words were like poison on his tongue,

“I love you, too. Mother loves you.”

And she walked away, and Louis did not feel the love. He felt obsession.

Mother was obsessed with him, always had been. She was possessive, overprotective, and built her whole sad and pathetic life around her son. There was no love there. Just obsession.

*

Louis watched Zayn’s car drive away down the road as it always did. Only this time, Louis was not at school, but he was standing alone in front of a very tall brick building tucked a little too tightly between the baker’s and a car repair garage. The only person besides from Zayn that he had seen in the area was a boy in a Burberry coat who looked quite like him, in fact, and yet he’d got onto a motorbike belonging to a man with long raspberry-rose hair. They had long gone, and now Louis was alone. He looked up at the building. It was made of red bricks and nothing was there to see but a small window on the top floor. He turned his gaze down to the blue gate that showed the entrance to the building, and walked up to it. It was one of those gates to enter a private building, and Louis began to push the pin number in that he’d scribbled on one of his plasters. It opened, and as he closed the gate behind him, he felt safer.

He walked up the metal stairs, his shoes clinking on the way. On one occasion, he tripped and fell, but picked himself back up. At the top of the stairs was a small platform where Louis could imagine many people hiding away in to snog or something of the sorts, and in front of him was a pink door with the words ‘Ballet School’ printed onto it in white letters.

He knocked, and no sooner as his fist hit the door, a dark-skinned woman in a white leotard and pink tights pulled it open. Louis looked her up and down and blushed.

“Hello, you must be Louis.” She said, grinning at him. She stepped aside, and Louis glanced behind him before entering the room. And when he saw the mirrors lined across the walls and the shine of the floorboards and the dazzling white lights in the ceiling, he smiled, and he hadn’t smiled like that in years. “You seem happy.” The woman said, pushing him into the room. “I am sure that you’ll do well.”

Louis looked at her, still clutching his bag protectively to his chest. “Ah—” He said, feeling as if it were his turn to speak but he had nothing to say. The woman’s eyes widened and then she laughed. She took Louis’ hand and shook it energetically. “I am so sorry, I get carried away with newbies. Not many of them stay so I like to make them feel welcome. My name is Maria. I am the manager and one of the coaches. The other coaches are Angela and Robin. They will be teaching you. You will have a dance partner to teach you the basic steps.”

Louis nodded slowly, blushing, but Maria continued to speak.

“Your dancing partner will be Lilly-Ann. She is about your age but has been dancing since she was a child. She is one of the best students we have had.”

Louis nodded again, and Maria finally let go of his hand. “Louis, we shall start today. Did you bring some ballet shoes?”

“Ah, no.” Louis said, awkwardly. “I can’t afford them..” He admitted, and bowed his head. Maria put a hand out to him. “Don’t worry,” She said, “we have some spares. Just tell me your shoe size and we’ll find some for you.”

*

A few moments later, Louis found himself standing in the middle of the ballet room with a pair of woman’s pointe shoes on his feet. Both he and Maria looked at them. “Well, they’ll have to do for now.” she said, “I didn’t expect you to have such small feet. You can keep them to hang on your wall at home.”

Louis looked at them for a while longer, tried to wriggle his toes but found out that he couldn’t, and then he looked up and grinned so truthfully that it made Maria’s mouth open in surprise. “Thank you.” He said, “Thank you.”

“Are you Louis Tomlinson?” a voice asked from the doorway. Louis glanced behind Maria to see an asian girl who looked barely 5’3, with hair tied into a bun and a pink leotard on. She looked like a perfect ballet dancer, and even the way that she walked up to Louis and Maria was elegant. “My name is Lilly-Ann.” she said, putting a hand out for Louis. Louis shook it, and then realised too late that she hand wanted him to kiss it as all ballet dancers that Louis had seen seemed to insist upon. “You haven’t danced before, have you?” She asked. She had a stern voice, and very little expression. Louis felt intimidated and it took him a long time to finally say, “Never.”

Lilly-Ann nodded. She then grabbed Louis’ hand and placed his other on her back. Louis yelped in surprise, and then blushed when he realised that she was not wearing a bra. “First, I want to see how well you can dance.” she said, unaware of how uncomfortable Louis felt with a girl so close to him. “Do you know the waltz?” she added, but gave him no time to answer when she began to move her feet. Louis was confused, and didn’t understand what he was doing, but he moved with her guidance. She frowned at him, and he closed his eyes. He could feel their feet moving together, the air move around their bodies, and he felt happy then, as if he’d entered a place of comfort that he’d been searching for.

But then someone’s hand grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him away from Lilly-Ann. He choked and was pulled up. “Poor posture, wrong steps, and you’re wearing woman’s pointe shoes.”

Louis looked up to see who was scolding him, and he saw a man there. He was taller than Louis by a lot, yet he only seemed to be a few years older. His dark and curly brown hair was tied into a bun, his green eyes were vicious and judgemental, and he wore a black leotard beneath a pair of jogging trousers. He had trainers on instead of the ballet shoes that Louis had expected to see.

Louis’ gaze followed that body back up until he met the face of the man. “Hello.” He said, hoping that someone would get him out of the situation, but no one, not even Maria, seemed to be at the rescue. They all stood aside and let the man speak his mind.

He put his hand out to Louis, slipped it in the space between his ribs and his arm, and rested it on the dip of his back. He took Louis’ other hand in his, and then he was pressing their bodies together. He leant over Louis, and Louis’ feet rose from the ground until he stood on tiptoe. “ _This_ is good posture. Keep your head up, and your back straight. Ballet dancers are lions, not kittens.”

Louis nodded, and the man let him go. He tried to remain as upright as he was told, but it was painful.

The man turned to Lilly-Ann. “You expect to teach a kid like this to dance like us? There is no way that he could do something that good. He’s got clumsiness written all over him.”

“I can try!” Louis shouted, and everyone turned to him in surprise. He seemed even surprised at himself, and he looked down for a few moments before turning back to the man. “I may be clumsy, but I can try.”

He had certainty in his stare, and the man frowned at him. “Do you really think that you have what it takes to be a dancer? I have seen endless people like you coming in here and thinking that they’ll be the best dancer in the world. They all leave disappointed, so what is it that would make me believe you’d stay?”

Louis bit his lip. “I don’t want to be the best. I don’t want to be the star of the show. I just want to dance.”

“It takes hard work. Commitment. I don’t see commitment in you. I’ll give it three weeks and you’ll quit.”

Louis was becoming agitated, and it showed on his face and in the way that he fidgeted with the loose string on his shirt. “Mother didn’t raise a quitter.”

The man looked at him for a long while then, and Maria finally came to the rescue, pulling Louis aside so that he could pay for the lessons. She handed him a sheet, he looked at the price, and his heart sank. “I—” he started, looking at the three digit balance. “I can’t afford it.” he admitted.

“What about in instalments?” Maria asked, “I realise that you’re still at school.”

Louis shook his head and put the paper down. He looked at his ballet shoes, and it was strange, but realising that he’d have to give them up was something that set needles through his heart. “Even in instalments, I could never afford this.”

“I’ll pay for him.”

Louis turned around. Those vicious eyes were on him, but within them, there was something that hadn’t been there before. “I’ll pay for everything on the condition that you prove me wrong. Prove to me that you aren’t a quitter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! What did you think of that chapter? Please leave kudos and comments so I can see what you think. Thank you so much!
> 
> Please share this book on social media so that more people can discover it, thank you, it would make me so so grateful! (really, you don't know this but it makes a huge difference)
> 
> Swan Lake is also available on wattpad with the same title. "Swan Lake - Larry Stylinson" by LHNameless  
> Written with my love, Lucy


	3. Assemblé

Louis stared at the amount of money that he was supposed to pay. Surely, this man—this _stranger_ —wouldn’t pay for him? It was far too much to ask. But then again, when there was certainty in that sharp face of his. He was not joking in the slightest.

“Harry..” Maria said, as surprised as Louis was but not for the same reason. She couldn’t believe that Harry of all people would do something like this for a beginner. He’d always looked down on them. “Are you sure?”

The ballet dancer walked up to Louis, and Louis wondered if he was going to get punched. Yet, as surprising as things were, the man bent down to align their faces, slid a finger beneath Louis’ chin and lifted the boy’s head up. He stared at Louis for an uncomfortably long while, many thoughts passing through his brain but he didn’t let Louis read them. Finally, he stood back up, picked up a towel that awaited on the bench, and began to walk to the changing rooms. “As I said—I will pay for everything.” and before he could leave, he turned back and bowed his head, “Your name is Louis, isn’t it? Welcome.”, and he was gone.

A long silence was cast over the three remaining people in the room. Everyone stared to the doorway where they’d seen the man last, and finally, Louis’ mind found itself again and he reacted. He squealed, balling his hands into fists, and jumped up and down in his brand new ballet slippers. He turned to Maria, and there was the biggest smile on his face. It was one of those rare smiles that made his white teeth shine and his eyes crinkle up and his cheeks and nose turn pink. But then, he was laughing, and if you were to think of the happiest thing in the world, it wouldn't even compare to the joy that Louis felt then.

“I have to—I have to thank Mr Harry.” He said, jumping from one foot to the other. He ran with difficulty to the changing rooms, and didn't hear both Maria and Lilly-Ann shout urgently for him to stop.

He pushed the door open and it slammed against the wall. Behind it, sat on a bench beneath a row of lockers, was Harry. He jumped in surprise, his head snapping up, and when the shock had passed over his face, he scowled. Louis looked at him, his eyes riding down his body, down the dressing gown that he’d pulled over himself, to his legs. He was strapping a prosthetic to a leg that had been cut off below the knee.

“Oh. I’m..” Louis started, backing away, and then he spun around, out of the room, and slammed the door closed. His heart was thumping, he felt so embarrassed and yet he wasn’t sure why. He stayed there for a few more seconds, leaning against the door and leaving his heart to race as it was doing, and then Lilly-Ann was standing in front of him, guiding him away to the ballroom.

“I suppose that you saw, then.” she said, sitting Louis down on the end of the long bench by the mirrors. Louis nodded, his cheeks flushed. “You shouldn’t have gone in there. He won’t be happy.”

Louis looked up at her, “What happened to him?”

She got down on her knees and began to tie the ribbons of Louis’ shoes correctly. “Harry has always loved ballet. His parents were ballet dancers, and so were their parents. He’s come down a long line of the most famous Ballerinas of all time, and surely that is why he’s so good. But he was diagnosed with bone cancer not long ago and it caused his leg to get bad, and, well you saw what happened.”

“But how can he dance?” Louis asked, “Why does he dance?”

Lilly-Ann looked up at him and there was sadness in those cold eyes, “You’re right in thinking that he’d stop dancing, and he did for a long while. He began to believe that he was not made for ballet, that he wasn't worth it. But shortly after he had found the heart to start dancing again, his Ballet partner got into a car accident. It killed her. Her name was Rosaline, his lover. She was to play the part of Odette in the upcoming show, Swan Lake, this winter, but of course, that isn’t going to happen. Harry was to be Prince Siegfried. They’d had an argument before she died, and he never got the chance to apologise. He now dances for her. He dances for her love.”

Louis remembered the poster on his wall, the one above his bed, and there was no doubt about it that Harry was the King of Ballet. Yet that King was living a life without his Queen.

Lilly-Ann tucked in the ribbons of Louis’ shoes and then paused for a moment. “He has never done this before—pay any attention to a newbie, I mean. There must be something about you, Louis.” She smiled then and stood up, trying to brush the sadness away when she added, “It must be all of those colourful plasters. Why do you have them anyway?”

Louis smiled stiffly, “I’m clumsy.”

*

Dear diary,

I did not speak to Mr Harry again, that day, but he did look at me out of the corner of his eye when he came into the room as if to say, ‘I hate you’. I don’t think that he likes me at all.. At least, if I were him then I wouldn’t like me. He must see me as a clumsy brat who spends his money and scuffs up his dance floor. In any case, he came back from the changing rooms wearing black tights beneath his jogging trousers and ballet slippers. He went to warm up alone, occasionally stopping to flick a finger at Maria so that she’d change the music to fit his needs. He was very flexible, as I remember, and he is one of those people who can put their leg next to their ear and do the upright splits. In a field of moths, he is a butterfly. That is the only way that I could describe someone like that.

Yours sincerely, Louis.

*

Louis shoved the diary under the bed and hugged his pillow for a while. The breeze from the crack in the window blew over him, but thankfully, it was warm. He rolled over to gaze at the poster above his bed. The prosthetic leg seemed to have a new meaning, now that he Louis was aware of the story behind it. The show was cancelled, the curtain would never rise, but more certainly, if Prince Siegfried were to dance over Odette’s death, then it would not be just an act any longer. Then again, in the end of the story, the Prince died with his lover, and Louis knew that for Harry, a life without dancing was death.

A knock on the front door made Louis sit up, and he scrambled off of the bed to see who it was. He leant of the old barrier at the top of the stairs and peered down it to the front door. Through the frosted glass, he saw a pink blob with bright blond hair. There was no doubt that only one person was foolish enough to knock on the Tomlinson’s door, and that person was Louis’ best friend, Niall. There was slight panic, then, when he realised that Mother was asleep on the sofa downstairs, and he hoped that Niall wouldn't ring the doorbell and wake her. He tiptoed down the stairs, they creaked beneath him, and he glanced around the living-room doorway to see his sleeping Mother before putting a hand on the front door and opening it. It creaked and clanged a little too loudly when the chain lock got stuck, and Louis had to close the door, wait for Mother to finish stirring, before even saying ‘hello’ to his friend.

He finally shut the door behind himself once that he’d stepped outside, and he smiled at Niall. He had only met Niall two years back, but he was his first and his only friend, and Niall had promised that he’d stay that forever. He was the sort to not let you down, the sort of angel that you’d not expect to find but one that—once it was there—would stay until the end. Louis trusted Niall, and he was right in doing so.

“Is she asleep?” Niall asked in that Irish accent of his. Louis nodded. “Did she hurt you?” Niall said. Louis nodded.

Niall looked Louis up and down. He wore his shirt that was too big again, his mismatched socks, and his shorts, and the only bright colours were all of those Mickey Mouse plasters. “I like this one.” Niall said, pointing to Louis’ elbow. He smiled, as if to reassure Louis, and Louis wavered for a moment, but his hands came out and he clung onto Niall as if he were the world. He began to cry, and Niall put a hand on the back of his head. Louis didn’t cry often—hardly ever—out of sadness, but now he couldn’t help it. He was too hurt; his knees, his hands, his pride, his heart.. There was a lot of pain in that little body of his, and the only wish that had was to dance it away.

“I can’t stay for long, but Granny told me to bring you some cookies.” Niall said when Louis finally pulled away. “She needs me to give her a bath. I would love to stay, but I really can’t.” He felt terrible for leaving Louis, but at least the small smile on Louis’ face reassured him when the boy took the basket of cookies from him. “We made them especially for you; They’re in the shapes of animals. Granny put in ten pounds, as well. Don’t let your mother see it.”

Louis nodded, touching the red spotty tea-towel that covered the cookies. “Thank you.” He said, “For everything.”

Niall lingered on the porch for a few moments, “You deserve better, you know. She doesn’t mark your worth. I wish that you could live with me and Granny, but her health.. and she doesn’t have the room.. but she’s always telling me that if her legs were better then the first thing she’d do would be to take custody of you.”, and then he turned away and began to walk down the path. At the gate, he turned back to say, “You can keep the basket. Put your pebble collection in it.” He waved, picked up his bike, and rode away to leave Louis wondering how his life would be if he were to live with Niall.

*

He was about to go back inside when someone called out, ‘wait!’. He heard a car stop, and he turned to it. His eyes widened when he saw a black Ferrari. It stood out in his little village, looking far too expensive and far too clean for a place like this. It was parked directly outside Louis’ gate, and then the door opened, and Harry stepped out.

He looked quite different than before. His hair was loose and tumbled over his shoulders, he wore black sunglasses, a white shirt, and despite the blazing heat, he wore jeans and converse shoes. Around his fingers were rings, around his neck was a locket with a pendant of a ballet slipper. He walked up to Louis’ gate and raised his sunglasses to balance them on the top of his head. “Are you free?”

Louis glanced to the living room window. The curtains behind them were shut. They were always shut. “Mother won’t let me leave the house.” He said, “I shouldn’t be here.”

Harry did not open the gate, but he looked around the small front garden. It was surrounded by a badly trimmed hedge, and the grass in the garden had clearly been mowed by someone who did not know how to use a lawnmower. “Is it only you and your mother living here?” He asked. Louis nodded, clutching the basket in his hands. Harry also nodded, but it seemed disapproving. “Is she out? All of the curtains are closed.”

Louis looked up at the face of his house and laughed uncomfortably, “Mother doesn’t really.. like them open. She doesn’t get along with people very well..” He heard a crack from inside the house, then a thud, and then silence. “I need to go.” He said, turning around. “I’m sorry.”

“Louis, wait—” Harry said, his usual monotone voice changing to urgency so fast that Louis couldn’t help but turn to him in surprise. Harry’s hand was reaching out, but upon realising that it was, he pulled it back. “After the Ballet class tomorrow, please come to my flat. There’s something that I’d like to see from you.”

Louis thought for a moment. Tomorrow was Monday, and he’d always finish at lunch time but had never told Mother. Usually, he’d be with Niall and Granny, but now he had ballet lessons. He had to be home by seven, and anything he’d do before that would be unknown by Mother. “Alright.” He said, and then he pushed the door to his house and left. He waited on the other side of it, his heart thumping heavily, and he heard the car drive away.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! What do you think of the book so far?
> 
> I hope that you're enjoying it, it's a pleasure to write it for you. XX
> 
> Please share on social media if you do enjoy the story so that more people can discover it, thank you so much, it means the world to me!
> 
> Written with my love, Lucy.


	4. Entrelacé

The School that Louis attended was called St John’s Academy, and was asides from being the least religious place on Earth, it was also very small, and very dilapidated. The wallpaper peeled in every corner, the one lift that the school could afford had been broken ever since Louis could remember, and when it rained, every room on the top floor would be invaded by puddles that seeped through the mouldering ceiling. The school was not a place where you’d like to go, but once you were there, had learnt every face of every student like you had no choice of doing, then you’d not want to leave. As small and as broken as this St John’s may have been, it was still home, and Louis did not want this final year to end.

“Ah, Dipshit! Wait up!” the loud voice of Shawn bellowed from the corner of the hall. Louis and Niall stopped walking and turned to it. Louis had got so used to his nickname that when Shawn walked up to him and finally called him ‘Louis’, he felt as if the boy were talking to someone else. “Louis,” He said again, tugging the straps of his bag, “The ballet, did you go?”

Louis frowned at him, “What’s it to you?” he asked,

Shawn looked behind himself to his group of friends that waved back or stuck up their middle fingers, “Well, I know that you’re having a rough time with money.. I have something for you.”

He opened his bag and gave Louis a box. Louis took it from him. He didn’t want to open it at first, hesitant to what may have been sitting inside, but he’d never had a present before. At least, not before Maria had given him his ballet shoes. He opened the box.

Inside it was a piece of silk, folded neatly. It was a pure white with rhinestones and glitter on it. Louis glanced at Shawn who’d started to fidget, and then he lay the box down to pull whatever was inside, out.

A white leotard tumbled down, glistening and sparkling in the lights of the hall, and Louis’ eyes lit up with it. Down the sleeves were silver ruffles, around the waist and down the sides of the hips as well. The neckline was rounded off at the collarbones, but lead up to the neck in white glittered mesh. It was the most beautiful thing that Louis could possibly ever hold, and strangely, when he held it, he felt as if it had become precious to him.

“I found it only fair that you should have every advantage on your side for our deal. I’m not being nice or anything, don’t get the wrong idea. I still don’t like you, Dipshit, but.. Good luck with your ballet.”

And then he punched the locker right beside Louis’ head, making him flinch back in fear, before turning his back and stomping away.

Niall put a hand out to touch the leotard, but Louis—without even realising it—pulled the leotard back and hugged it against his chest. Niall looked at him, his hand still out, and Louis finally accepted it and extended the leotard towards him.

“So soft..” Niall said quietly, “So beautiful..”

“Why would he do something like this?” Louis asked, “Is he making fun of me?”

He looked over to the corner of the hall. Shawn stood with his friends, talking, all of them looking at Louis and Niall. Niall watched Shawn for a while, but he never noticed a thing. His eyes were on Louis, and Louis alone. “No...” Niall said, slowly, “He’s not making fun of you. Don’t ever think like that.”

*

Louis ran up the metal stairs to the ballet studio. He tripped and fell, scrapping his hands, but he picked himself up and scampered back up them as if he couldn’t wait a second longer. He couldn’t wait to put on his ballet shoes, even if they did hurt his feet, and he couldn’t wait to see his new friends, even if they probably didn’t consider him that way.

Louis’ lesson was from four to five o’clock, and so was Lilly-Ann’s. He had only been to two of them so far, but he’d met Angela and Robin as well. Angela was a tall and thin woman with a sharp face and eyes that would always look down on you. She stood proud, tall, and her voice was strict. Louis was sure that she came from Russia, or some country over there. Robin was a small and rather overweight man in his sixties. He did not look like a dancer in the slightest, but he knew what advice to give and when to give it. He had been married to Angela, but had divorced years ago. Louis was positive that he still liked her, even just a little bit, but he knew that their time together was over as lovers.

As always, Maria had been there, teaching Lilly-Ann and giving her advice, not that she needed it. But Harry also attended the lessons, and Louis wasn’t quite sure why. He was not there to learn, since he was a professional, and so he’d stand in his own corner and dance on his own. Every time that Louis had glanced over at him in that small studio, all that he’d seen was that butterfly. Harry was always a butterfly.

  


Louis closed the door to the studio behind him, took off his shoes and put them beside the ones that lined the doorway. He saw everyone’s pairs but Harry, then again, Harry never took his off here. He’d go to the changing rooms. Louis feared going to the changing rooms, now. He’d always linger outside the door, listening to hear a locker close or a voice, or any form of indication that Harry was in there. And now, he waited, and he heard no one. He pushed the door open, poked his head around it, and the room was dark. He smiled, fully opening the door and flinging his bag into the room as he slammed the door behind himself, humming a song, flicking the light on, and then he turned around and screamed.

Harry was sat on a bench with a bottle of water in one hand and a phone in the other, looking at Louis. He seemed bored, a little drained from all the dancing perhaps, but other than that he looked alright.

“Why were you in the dark?” Louis asked, keeping his eyes on Harry as he walked up to his bag and put in on a bench opposite him.

Harry shrugged and returned to his phone. He didn’t turn it on, and seemed to almost be expecting something from it. “The lights are automatic. They went out.”

Louis hated to state the obvious and tell Harry that he could have turned them back on, yet he felt the need to, but Harry interrupted him to say, “This is your third lesson, and you are still here. What do you think? Are you enjoying ballet?”

Louis nodded, a little too enthusiastically perhaps, and Harry laughed under his breath. “I’m glad.” He said, “Not many people stay. They get tired of it; of the work. Then again, you haven’t started the proper work yet.”

“I haven’t?” Louis asked, a bit surprised and a bit disappointed.

Harry looked at him, then back to his phone. “Of course not. Doing plié, relevé, sauté for an hour isn’t ballet. That is just steps. Ballet isn’t simply moving your body, it’s understanding it and trusting it. Your feet are your own, your hands and arms are your own. They will move where you ask. The hardest and easiest part of ballet is to trust them.”

Louis looked down at his hands and wiggled his fingers. Trust them. He stood up and looked down at his feet. He wiggled his toes, and he watched them move inside his shoes. Louis put his arms out if front of him and pointed his fingers just in the way that he had been taught. Trust them.

“Relax your arms, you’re a dancer not a stick.”

Louis put his arms down and sat on the bench, slightly annoyed that Harry had pointed out his mistake.

“Giving up?” Harry said, the corner of his mouth raised into a cruel smile. “I gave it three lessons. You’re tiring out.”

Louis looked at him, and there was a moment where Harry could tell that Louis was thinking about something but ha wasn’t quite sure what. After that moment, Louis stood up and said, in the most certain voice that Harry could imagine from a boy that size, “Mother didn’t raise a quitter.”

And it became clear to him then, that this boy—covered in plasters and dressed in rags—wouldn’t give up his ballet shoes for the world.

“You better get ready. You’ll be late.” Harry said. Louis nodded, sitting back down on the bench and feeling rather sad, but he wasn’t sure why. He felt as if the world was testing him, as if every person in it was just expecting him to give up, but he wouldn’t.

Harry stood up, and it was only when he did that Louis finally realised the faint squeaking noise that he’d been hearing over the past two lessons was Harry’s prosthetic.

*

“Now _leeeean_.” Angela’s voice boomed into Louis’ ear as she leant her knee on his back. He was in immense pain, sat on the floor with his legs apart and out, and his body being shoved forwards as if he were a piece of paper being folded. Angela pushed down on his back and Louis whined in pain until she finally let him go and he sprang back up with a sigh of relief. Angela stared down at him and he smiled doubtfully. Angela—hands on her hips—raised her eyebrow, “I have never seen a person so.. so _st_ _iff_ before in my entire career.”

“That’s rather a large exaggeration, don’t you think?” Maria said, helping Louis back up.

Angela walked up to Louis and pulled his cheeks, squishing his face and then examining him, “It is not! This child is as rigid as cardboard. But he has a strong heart, and even the most inflexible and clumsy can become prima ballerinas if their hearts are in the right place.”

Louis looked up at her and she gripped his shoulders. “Louis Tomlinson,” She said in her Russian accent, “Find your heart, find your reason to dance, and I promise you that you shall be one of the greatest prima ballerina of your age.”

“Really?” Louis said, his face lighting up. Angela seemed surprised but hid her emotions by turning away and waving a hand to Louis dismissively, “The greatest.” she said, and Louis felt his heart burst from joy.

He looked over at Harry, and Harry watched him back in the mirror. His body was tight, back muscles visible beneath his leotard, yet he did not remove his jogging trousers. His fingers were perfectly placed, and even Louis—who did not know a thing about ballet besides plié, relevé, sauté—could tell that there was not a single flaw in what he was doing. But despite Harry being there, he had never danced like a Ballet dancer should. It was surely the lack of room that prevented Harry from letting go of everything and dancing like the world said he could, but Louis wanted to see it himself. He wanted to learn Harry’s body, to see how he moved, to understand what he’d meant when he’d said to ‘trust them’.

And then Louis remembered that he was going to Harry’s house after the lesson, and it intimidated him, but once he remembered he couldn’t help but get butterflies of excitement inside of himself. He wondered what Harry wanted, if he could give it, and then he was grabbed by the wrist and pushed into a position of full contortion as Angela scolded him to be more flexible.

Harry, watching in the mirror, smiled.

*

“Do you have any pets?” Louis asked from the passenger seat of Harry’s Ferrari, “Because I’m allergic to cats. I found one abandoned in the gutter once and every day I’d give it some of my food but i’d always get a rash afterwards.”

Harry glanced in the rear-view mirror, adjusted it, and then said, “I live alone.”, and after further thought, “I have an aquarium of tropical fish. Are you allergic to fish, too?”

Louis couldn’t tell that he was being sarcastic and said, “No, only cats. Why do you live alone? How old are you? Where are your parents?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Harry observed. “I turned twenty-one in February, I live alone because I moved out, and my parents are in Los Angeles from what I last heard. They travel a lot, what with their shows and things..”

Louis looked at Harry, having not much choice since he couldn’t see out of the car windowsas all of them were too high, “Why don’t you do shows with them? It would be like a travelling circus, only with ballet.”

“We’re here.” Harry said, ignoring Louis’ question as he pulled into a driveway. Louis watched a garage door opening, then the chandelier that hung behind it, and then the door clanged shut.

“Woah..” He said, scrambling out of the car and almost tripping when he got tangled in the seatbelt. He looked at the glass chandelier that hung down from the garage ceiling, then to the white walls, and then he skipped up to Harry who was walking up a staircase to the door at the top of it. “ _Awesome_. Penthouse..”

“Take your shoes off when you come in.” Harry said, walking down a corridor and around the corner to a shoe rack. Everything in his house was white, but knick-knacks and plants decorated it as well. Louis found it very sophisticated. He kicked off his shoes, noticed how all of Harry’s were neatly aligned on the shoe rack, and he put his there as well. Harry sent him off down the corridor, and Louis wondered why, but then remembered that Harry was self-conscious about his prosthetic, so he left him to it.

The penthouse seemed huge, but then again, the walls were taller than those in Louis’ house. He found himself in a large room with a staircase and corridor to his left, a bar and row of kitchen counters to his right with a fridge and a glass table, and ahead of him was a couple of sofas. The whole wall ahead of him was just glass. Huge glass windows that let in light and warmth, and beyond that was a huge balcony with deck chairs, a beige parasol, and a swimming pool.

“AWESOME!” Louis said for the second time, only this time, he shouted and hopped up and down. He skipped over to the glass windows and pressed his face against and hands against them, looking at the blue ripples of the water.

“Hey, hands off the glass. You don’t know how long it took me to get them that clean.” Harry said, walking into the room. He had bunny slippers on, and Louis’ nose wrinkled when he saw them.

“Do you want a drink?” Harry asked, as Louis trotted up to him, “Orange squash or a beer?”

Louis looked at the beer bottle, and although it did seem very tempting to drink alcohol for the first time in his life, he shook his head. “I shouldn’t drink, I’m underage. Also mother drinks that.”

Harry looked down at him for a long while, long enough to make Louis fidget, and then he put the beer in the back of the fridge, tucked out of sight behind some food. “What do you lack, Louis? When you’re dancing?” He asked, obviously wanted a specific answer that he had in mind. Louis knew what that answer was.

“Ah, I guess, everything accounted, I lack confidence.”

Harry turned around. He had two shots of brown liquid in his hands. “Correct. If there is one thing that I’ve learnt from alcohol is that it gives you confidence. Here. It’s a Jäger bomb. Tastes a bit like licorice.”

“I don’t like licorice.” Louis said, taking the cup and smelling what was in it. The drink did smell nice.

Harry didn’t wait for him, and chugged the whole thing before saying, “I can tell that you’ve never drank before. You don’t drink alcohol for the taste, you drink it for the power.” and he smiled, and Louis suddenly felt both obliged and willing to drink it.

And so he did. It burned his throat and made him shiver, but when he put down the glass, it was empty.

“Yummy..” He said to himself, licking his lips. He looked at Harry, and Harry had a smug-looking smile on his face. “Can I have another?”

Harry shook his head, and spun Louis around to march him over to the balcony doors. “Absolutely not. I want confidence, not drunkenness. Besides, I need to get you home by seven. For now, however, there’s something else that I want from you. I must warn you—it may make you uncomfortable, but you can tell me if you want to stop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Are you enjoying the book so far? What do you think it is that Harry wants?
> 
> If you do enjoy this story then please share it on social media, it really means a lot. You can find me pretty much anywhere with the username 'LHNameless', thank you so much! Xx
> 
> Written with love, Lucy.


	5. Pirouette

Louis stepped onto the balcony, closely followed by Harry who'd put a hand on his shoulder to guide the way. Summer heat engulfed them as soon as they stepped out in the sun, and while Harry said, "Ugh," Louis smiled and put his arms out for the breeze to catch him. The air up here was muskier than the air back in Louis' village, smelling like petrol and the flowers in the round-about in front of Harry's penthouse. Louis looked over the glass fence. There were hills ahead, surrounding them as if they were in a green and grassy bowl. Louis had almost expected to see the Hollywood sign, but then he remembered where he was. Below was a road and the round-about. A few cars drove past, some people walked by with their dogs, and then Harry called Louis over to the shade of the parasol so that he'd not get sunstroke.

As Louis walked up, Harry put out a hand invitingly for him to take, and when he places his own bandaged and plastered fingers there, Harry guided him around to a chair for him to sit on.

"Your house is really nice." Louis said for the endless time, looking at a huge swan rubber-ring that glided over the water in the pool. He then turned back to Harry who was looking at his phone that sat on the table—expecting. "Are you waiting for a call?" Louis asked, "Why don't you call them?"

Harry looked away from the phone to the ground, and then his eyes followed Louis' body to rest on his face. There was sadness there, heartbreak, and he said, "No one would answer."

Louis may have not been the best person in the world at guessing things, but Harry was waiting for Rosaline. And Rosaline awaited in her grave for him.

"She would forgive you." Louis said, without thinking about it until he realised he'd said his thought aloud.

Harry's face read, 'how do you know about that?', but he just turned back to his hands, twisting a ring around his finger. "You're right, she probably would have forgiven me. After all, it was not a big problem that we'd had. But she can't accept an apology if she isn't here to listen. She died, and the last thing that I said was to 'get out of my sight'." and then he looked up, tears standing in his eyes, pain leaking from his heart and it poured from his mouth when he spoke, "Don't ever say things that you don't mean. Things like that, if you don't take them back, they'll haunt you. Regrettable words circle back again and again, they become a part of you, and they destroy you. So don't say things that you don't mean."

Louis looked at him, blue eyes wide, heart too heavy, horror and fear written all over his face. Somewhere in that cold facade of Harry's, there was something waiting, something broken and lost perhaps, but he was not the heartless dancer that he'd been showing himself as. He was just a boy, in the end, just a boy that spoke every thought on his mind, and just a boy who'd fallen in love once, and he was waiting for his love to call him in return.

Louis turned to the waistline of his shorts and pulled out a little box. From inside of it, he pulled out a Mickey Mouse plaster—the biggest and best one that he could find. He gave it to Harry.

Harry frowned at it, then at Louis, before taking the plaster hesitantly. Louis smiled at him, "It makes me feel better when I'm sad. I hoped that it would make you feel better, too."

A warm breeze swept over the balcony and caught Louis' hair, pushing it down over his eyes and nose. Louis sneezed, and laughed from sneezing, and then beamed up at Harry with a face that showed no threat nor pain, or anything but love for the sad world that he lived in.

Harry paused for a moment, but then an unwilling smile crawled over his face and he bit his lip, looking down at the plaster and fondling it between his fingers, "You know what? It works. These plasters of yours must be magic, Louis."

Louis crossed his legs and tucked the box back into the waistline of his shorts. "What did you want from me?" He asked, suddenly remembering the reason why he was there in the first place." Harry had seemed to have forgotten as well, as he appeared surprised when Louis brought the subject up.

"Oh, yes." He said, still holding the plaster with no intention of letting it go. "I have a suggestion for you. I see that ballet is something you want to do, but have you ever tried any other kind of dancing?" Louis shook his head, and Harry continued, "I think that we should expand the very, should I say, _lacking_ knowledge of yours? If you want to dance, you need to understand it. You need to understand yourself." He looked at Louis dead in the eyes, "Dirty dancing. I want you to dirty dance with me."

Louis' mouth dropped open, and he wasn't sure if it was from the demand, from the frustration that had built up behind it, or from the confidence that Harry had said it with. In any case, Louis' mouth was left hanging open and Harry was the one to lean over and push his jaw up until it closed. "Dirty dance?" Louis repeated, making sure that he'd heard correctly, even if there was no doubt about it. "You mean.."

Harry nodded, "That's right. Erotic dance. I'm not being a pervert, before you assume that, and you can say no if you want. But dirty dancing is a type of dance performed with two people, usually a man and a woman, and they discover their own and each others' bodies. That is why I think that dirty dancing before ballet is a good idea for you. Learn about yourself, about your body, and let me guide you."

"Can you dance like that?" Louis asked, seeming as if he'd never get over the shock. Harry laughed, looking at the plaster, "In this day and age?" he said, "Of course I know how to dance like that. Come on, let me teach you." He stood up and put a hand out for Louis to take. This time, when Louis' fingers touched Harry's palm, they were trembling, but it was not fear. There was an exhilarating feeling, something that ran through every drop in Louis' bloodstream. Harry smiled at him, softly, and put a hand on Louis' back, as respectfully as Louis had put his hand on Lilly-Ann's.

The young boy with the smile brighter than the sun and the plasters over his lies felt roses burst into flower in his heart, dandelions and carnations bloom from his fingertips, violets and lily-of-the-valleys wrap themselves around his wrists to spread like wildfire all the way to Harry. Louis felt like this was the warmest and sunniest place in the world, that nowhere and no one could hurt him anymore, and he believed it then—that safety was wherever Harry was. And he hadn't felt safe for a long time.

Harry leant over to the wall and tapped a button on a monitor. Music began to play from a large speaker on the wall—sexual yet without lyrics. It was nice.

Harry turned back to him, the hot sun blazing down on them both, and he moved closer. He turned Louis around so he was facing the other way, and then his torso was pressed to Louis' back, his hand was on Louis' stomach, and he leant his chin on Louis' shoulder, "As small as you are," He said, "you're just the perfect height for this." He then put another hand on Louis hip and stood back up, but the lower parts of their bodies were still touching. "Think of how belly-dancers move. The rotation of the hips while not moving anything up here." He touched Louis' ribs, "Lock your body, and move your hips."

Harry was surprised to see that Louis could do what he'd asked. The boy raised his arms, upper-body locked, and he swayed his hips before Looking back expectantly. Harry smiled, "That was... quite perfect."

He pressed their bodies together, one hand on Louis' stomach, another holding his the tips of his fingers at shoulder height. "Now, do it again. Left then right. In time with the music." He said, and Louis did as he was told. Harry moved with him. Louis moved a little fast, but Harry's hand had moved down from the boy's stomach to his hipbone and he slowed down. After a moment, Louis suddenly let go of Harry's hand and flipped around. Before Harry could do anything, Louis' arms were around his neck, and he was moving his hips like before, swaying them in time with Harry's, but they were face-on. "I like this way better. I want to see your face." He said, and Harry blushed and pulled away.

Louis watched curiously as Harry leant on the balcony fencing for a moment. Finally, he stood up straight, pulled his shirt off, and turned back around to Louis. Beads of sweat covered his skin, and Louis could understand that. "Louis, where did you learn to dance like that?" Harry asked. "You've danced like that before, there is no way that this could be new to you."

Louis laughed awkwardly and shuffled a foot over the ground, "My mother used to bring home men. She still brings home men.. I see them together. Hear them. I may have never danced like this but I know what it is because of them."

Harry sat on a chair in the shade. "How does it make you feel when you see your mother do that kind of dancing?"

Louis wiped his hands on his shirt and sat with Harry beneath the parasol, "It disgusts me."

Harry tilted his head, "How about when you dance like that with me? Do I disgust you?"

Louis' head snapped to him, and he squinted his eyes closed to shake his head, "You're not mother. No one could be mother. If I told you to stop, you would. All of the times when I was stuck in a cot back at home, watching her with a man in bed.. All of the times when I'd asked her to stop.. Not once did she listen."

"How do you know that I'd stop if you were to ask?" Harry said, and when Louis appeared to be thrown on edge, he added, "I would stop. Of course I would, but how can you trust me that much?"

Louis swung his legs and picked at the corner of a plaster on his thigh, "I think that, whatever you could do to me, it could never be as bad as what mother does." he then looked at Harry and smiled, "You're nicer than I thought. I like you."

And Harry smiled back, "As do I. I like you too, Louis."

"You do?" Louis asked, leaning over his chair to put his hands on the armrests of Harry's seat. "Do you really mean that?"

"Of course. Forgetting that you're a terrible ballet dancer, there's a lot more of you that I have yet to discover. Besides, we're friends aren't we? Or do you not want to be friends?"

Louis scrambled over his chair and leapt onto Harry. He wrapped his arms around his neck, and he was hugging him. Harry didn't expect it, and almost dropped his phone in surprise. Louis was warm, sticky, lonely, but he gave hugs that he meant, and those were the nicest hugs of all. "I want to be friends with you. Please be my friend."

Harry put a hand on Louis' head and let his body relax into the hug, "I can do that."

*

Harry dropped Louis off at his little house, waved goodbye, and Louis watched the car disappear down the road, feeling as if Harry had abandoned him like a stray dog, or a burnt out cigarette, or anything that would quickly get trampled on. He sighed, squished his plaster back over his knee from where it was peeling off, and walked into the house. Booze and drugs and he daren't guess what else blew over him when he shut the door. He dug in his bag and pulled out a surgical mask, pulling it over his nose and mouth, and he heard mother cackled drunkly in the living room. He tiptoed up to the door, put his hands on the frame, and peeped around it. Mother was there in a strapless dress that hung on her skinny body and made her pallid skin appear grey. She had heeled shoes on her feet, but they were too big and one of the heels was snapped off. She had a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It dropped ash onto the leather sofa and wooden floor, and Louis could already see himself cleaning it up after her.

Mother hadn't seen him, nor heard him, but there was a stranger on the sofa, and he had his eyes on the boy cowering behind the doorway. For someone who never went outside, Louis thought, Mother was awfully good at finding men to bring home. Of course, none had the intention of staying with such a horrible, slobbish person, but they were there for sex, and that had been made clear.

Louis ignored the sinister smile from the man on the sofa and turned to the kitchen. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, except without the peanut butter because mother had eaten it all, and she'd eaten all of the jelly as well.. Louis made himself two slices of stale bread and put them together, and then he ran up to his room, stepping on the places of the stairs that he'd marked out as the quietest.

Louis did not want Mother to see him. He did not want her to hear. He did not want her to remember him. At least, if she forgot her son, then maybe his loneliness would finally go away.

He kicked off his shoes, then his shirt and socks, and he lay on his bed to cool down for a moment, nibbling on the only food that he would eat that evening. He had nothing to do in that bare little room of his, and the only things that he had were the ballet slippers hidden in the slit in his mattress. But as much as he wanted to dance, to practice moving his feet and arms and trusting his limbs like Harry trusted his.. he couldn't make a sound. He couldn't make a sound, because Mother lurked on the other side of the door. Louis had heard her follow him upstairs, he'd heard the creaking and cracking of the floorboards and the 'shlick, clunk, shlick, clunk' of the wine glass hitting each step as she'd crawled not walked. Mother was now outside the locked door, Louis could hear her wheezing breaths, but she did not say anything. She merely lurked there. Waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you all for reading! It really means a lot to me, I'm so grateful!
> 
> What do you think of the characters and the book so far? What would you like to see more of? Is there anything you'd like to see in particular? (I may be able to add it to the story, suggest anything).
> 
> Again, thank you for reading. If you so enjoy the book, please share it on social media. Honestly, your support is what had made me keep on with my writing all of this time so thank you so much for that.
> 
> Written with my love, Lucy.


	6. Plié

**

“Oh my, Louis, you look as if you haven’t eaten in a week!” Niall’s granny said, oven tray in hands, as she watched Louis sitting at the table, devouring the meal that she’d given to him. He looked up, mouth full of baked potato, and said, “It’s been longer than that.” and then he returned to his food. Granny turned around to take the hot and plump blueberry muffins off of the tray and onto a plate to cool down. “I heard that you were doing ballet, now.” she said over her shoulder. Niall—sat beside Louis at the kitchen table—nodded his head enthusiastically.

“He’s well amazing, he is! He wears pointe shoes and they tried to make him change and give him normal ones but he didn’t want to so now he’s the prima ballerina! He’s well cool!”

Louis grinned and hid his face in his hands. Granny turned around to smile at him, “Well,” she said, “It seems as if you have a fan, already. I would also love to see you dance, Louis, if you’re willing to show old Granny, that is.”

Louis looked up at her. His nose and cheeks were pink, but he had the sweetest smile on his face. Granny’s heart always ached for him. His mother didn’t deserve a son, let alone one with a heart like his. He loved the world too much for his own good. He loved everything and everyone that came into his life, and perhaps that was wrong of him, because the world didn’t usually love him in return. In any case, whenever Louis smiled, every trace of his mother’s features seemed to fade away, and Granny was wise enough to guess that that was the reason why he never stopped grinning.

“I’m really.. not that good.” Louis said, “But I can try! I can show you what Harry does! He’s better than me and more flexible and taller and has more muscle.. but I can try!”

Granny gave Louis a muffin and he took it from her and stuffed in into his mouth. She chuckled, “If it is you, Louis, I’m sure that you can do anything that you want to do. You’ll be the best ballerina in the world. Do you know why I think that?”

Louis shook his head, and Granny smiled, “I know that you will be the best ballerina because you keep your heart in the right place. As difficult as life may be for you, you’re unstoppable, and I think that that is rather amazing.”

*

The living room was so quiet that Louis could hear the flies buzz around in it. Only a small strip of light seeped in between the curtains to lay on the wall with the peeling wallpaper and alcohol stained into it. There was a large photo of Mother and Louis there, from when Louis was a child. It was summer, and he was five at the time. They were outside, in a carpark, and mother had taken the photo herself with an old phone. Her face was contorted into some kind of grin but her eyes were wide, hollow, and staring. She wore a dress, one that she’d worn for two weeks in a row, and her collarbones showed beneath it. Her hand was on Louis’ shoulder, chipped acrylic nails digging into the smooth flesh and making red marks there. Louis was smiling, by force, through pain, with the fear of being hurt if he didn’t cooperate correctly, yet he wasn’t old enough to even know what ‘correctly’ was.

Mother sat beneath the photograph, now, lounging on the sofa with a lit cigarette between her bony fingers. Her acrylic nails were pink, Louis liked the colour, but he didn’t like how they felt when she’d caress his cheek or claw his arms with them. He put the scrubbing brush in the bucket of murky water, shook it out, and began to rub vigorously at the floorboards again. His back ached, his stomach growled, and his hands and knees had marks from being on the floor for so long.

“Louis, darling?”

Louis jumped at the sudden sound and bolted up to stand by the broken fireplace, “Yes, mother?”

Mother looked at him through the dark and stuffy room. A fly landed on her shoulder and she moved so fast to squish it with her palm that Louis winced back in fear. She flicked it onto the floor that her son had spent hours cleaning, “Bring me another cigarette, would you?”

Louis bowed his head, “Yes, mother.”

“Wait. Darling.” Mother said when Louis began to walk away, “Come here.” She put a hand out invitingly and Louis took it. Shivers ran up his arm and down his spine. She looked at the marks on his hands, then those on his knees. “You are hurt.” she said, brushing her finger over them carefully. “Which monster hurt my son? Was it that teacher of yours? The one with the scary voice? Who hurt you, Louis?”

Louis tried to pull out of her grasp, gently, without letting her know that he was attempting to do so, “No, Mother. It is just imprint of the floorboards. I have the marks, see?” he said, pointing to the parallel lines that the floorboards had marked on his right knee.

Louis’ mother looked at them, took her son’s hands, and tears stood in her eyes when she looked at him. “You should be more careful.” she said. “You’re letting yourself get hurt.”

She slapped him across the face.

“Don’t get hurt! Do you not love yourself? I love you, Louis!” she said, standing up and hugging him. She was crying, holding the cigarette away from her son so that it wouldn’t burn him, and then she slapped him again in the same place as before—across his left cheek. “Love yourself, you foolish boy. You’re beautiful, too beautiful to get hurt. Love yourself.”

She kissed Louis’ bleeding cheek, and Louis was too terrified to even scream.

He just stood there, as tense as a statue in her suffocating grip, counting down the days until she’d beat him to death.

*

“—and I think that he wanted to give me more of them but he didn’t because, well, if he had, then there wouldn’t have been any left for next time, which is good because—do you understand what I’m talking about? You look out of it.” Louis said, finally raising his head to see Harry sitting across from him in the dance studio, a sloppy smile on his face to show that he really was out of it.

“You’re a real chatterbox once that you’re comfortable.” Harry said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but continue. I’ll listen.”

Louis looked down at his ballet shoes and tucked in one of the ribbons. He sighed but he was a happy sigh—a peaceful one, “No, never-mind. I’ll tell you another time.” He put his legs out if front of him and did ‘good toes, naughty toes’ with himself until Lilly-Ann—who’d been sitting across the room, by the mirrors—said, “You know what would be nice? I wish that we could do the Ballet show at Christmas.. Swan Lake. We had trained so much for it, it’s a shame that it has been cancelled.”

“A shame?” Harry glowered at her, and she looked down, embarrassed, “Rosaline died, and you call it a ‘shame’ that the show has been cancelled?”

“I’m sorry.” Lilly-Ann said to him, feeling truly awful for her words, “I didn’t mean for it come come out like that, but it would be nice to dance again. She would have wanted us to, I’m sure.”

“Bullshit. You can’t find another person to play Odette. Rosaline isn’t something to be replaced like that.” Harry said angrily. “If you think that the show is back on then you’re dead wrong. I won’t dance that show with anyone but her.” His prosthetic clicked when he stood, and Louis, along with everyone else, watched him storm out of the room.

Lilly-Ann sighed, watching the ripples in her water bottle until Louis said, “I know that it’s got nothing to do with me, because after all, I’m not a great dancer like any of you, but I think that the show would be a good idea. I think that if Harry were to dance the ballet then he’d be able to move on from Rosaline. This could be his apology to her.”

“That is good thinking,” Angela said, drumming her fingers on her arm, “but Harry is stern, and the love that he shared with Rosaline was unconditional. He has not danced ballet with anyone since, and he never will. Without him, we could not pull off a good performance, but we do not have him, so we do not have Swan Lake.”

“But what if.. What if we could find someone that Harry would dance with? Surely, there must be someone that he trusts enough? What about you, Lilly-Ann?” Louis asked.

Lilly-Ann shook her head. “He’s like an older brother to me, certainly, but we could never dance together. We lack too many things. The world would end before we could dance together properly.”

“Is there no one else?” Louis asked, “What about the other dancers?”

Maria shook her head this time, “Don’t even think about it. He’s made it clear that he’ll dance with no one but Rosaline.”

“What about with me?” Louis asked, almost regretting it as soon as the words slipped his tongue. As if he—a beginner, and a very bad one, at that—could dance with the King of Ballet. Everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing as they stared judgementally at him, and then Lilly-Ann scoffed rudely.

“Don’t be silly, that’s a—” she paused. A crease formed between her eyebrows and she frowned, reflecting on the wild suggestion, “Actually, that is not such a terrible idea. Of course, you would need to put in a huge amount of effort to even reach the most basic flexibility and skills of a ballerina, and for obvious reasons, you would have to take extra lessons to play the part of Odette and Odile, but... you have had worse ideas before.” Lilly-Ann watched Louis while others rested their gazes on her. “It may be an impossible demand to ask Harry, but as far as I can see, if there were one person left in the world that he would be willing to dance with—it’s Louis.”

Angela’s fingers continued to drum against her arm as she stared judgementally down at Louis as she always did. “Louis,” she said in that foreign accent of hers. She stopped then, as if she had too many things to say so she said none of them. Finally, she nodded her head, “I will fetch the King.”, she said, before walking to the changing rooms where running water could be heard.

*

A while later, she returned with Harry tagging along behind her. He wore his jogging trousers, trainers, but no shirt. A white towel was over his shoulders and his hair was wet. He looked as angry as he'd been when he'd left. Lilly-Ann turned away from him when he glared at her.

Everyone turned expectantly to Louis who hadn’t prepared any kind of grand speech in his head, and quite frankly, had no idea what was expected of him. Harry—upon seeing that everyone was waiting for Louis—shifted his gaze to him as well and raised and eyebrow as if to say ‘well?’

“Do uh—” Louis said, making a fool of himself as usual. He began to stand up, hesitated by almost sitting back down again, but he finally got to his feet and walked over to Harry. His curls had been straightened by the water, and Harry tucked his hair behind his ear, looking down at Louis expectantly. “I uh—”

“Do you need to write it down? If so, I have a pen.” Harry said, surprising Louis when the faintest hint of a smile passed over the angered expression that he had.

“No, I uh—” Louis had no idea what to say, and he’d leave a long list of exclamation marks if he were to write his thoughts down. Finally, when Harry had put a hand on his hip and everyone had began to glance at everyone else, Louis found what he wanted to say, “I know that I lack in everything compared to you, that I’m just me, and that’s nothing too grand, but I was wondering if..” He paused, suddenly remembering something that Harry had told him about lacking confidence. He looked back, glared, and he said, “I want you to dance with me. I want to be your Swan Princess.”

Angela gasped, Lilly-Ann and Maria had wide eyes, Robin muttered a brief ‘oh my,’, and Harry seemed completely baffled by how much confidence the little boy in plasters had.

He did not reply for a moment. A moment of which Louis ought to have been losing his pride like he’d always lost it in long situations like this one, but his heart was racing, and he watched Harry. The King of Ballet did something strange then, in the eyes of people who knew him well, at least. He stood as if he were about to bow, and then he did. The proud and arrogant King bowed down to Louis, taking his hand, and when he stood, there was a soft smile on his face. “You may lack in skills but you learn fast and you learn to perfection. There was not a trace of confidence in you when we first met, and yet you are here, ordering me to dance with you.”

“But that doesn’t mean no.” Louis said, and Harry knew that he wouldn’t take anything but ‘yes’ for an answer.

“You are not Rosaline, but you have what she had, possibly even more. Rosaline danced with passion, but you.. You dance with love. The Swan Princess and her Prince need love.” He looked at Louis, unaware of the other people in the room, “In other words, I find it an honour to dance with you.”

Louis, despite what he had portrayed himself as previously, hadn't actually expected Harry to agree, and he appeared confused for a moment, "Really?" he asked, "With me?"

Harry shook his hair and sprayed Louis with water. It made him giggle. Harry then put a hand on Louis' shoulder and squeezed it. "You'll come to my penthouse, right? To practice? Would you like that, Louis?"

Louis' eyes widened and he grinned so much that the sun came out from behind the cloud that had been hiding it all day. "Can I?" he asked, skipping on his point shoes. "Your house is my favourite. If I could, I'd live there, too!"

Louis laughed jokingly, and only Lilly-Ann saw the expression on Harry's face, then.

The Prince, she thought, was already in love with the Swan, and he had just realised it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **
> 
> Hello everyone! How are you finding the book?
> 
> In case you're thinking 'Odette is a girl, Louis is a boy' then I just have something to say:  
> This is the world that I want to live in. In this world, gender doesn't justify your actions, sexuality is not even thought about, disability doesn't stop you from being outstanding, and race does not make a person more or less important.  
> If you think about it, not a single person has commented 'ballet is for girls', not a single one has told Louis that he 'can't wear pointe shoes' because he is a boy. In fact, not even his mother had assumed that a man would hurt her son when she saw the floorboard prints on his knees. She just referred to them as a 'monster'.  
> As for sexuality, Love is Love, and no one thinks anything different to that.
> 
> I just want one story where every person is equal. Just one story where people are loved for being people and not labels.
> 
> *
> 
> If you ever have free time or get bored, read into the characters and the story, you'll find a lot more things there that you hadn't noticed before.
> 
> Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this! Please share on social media and follow me on instagram (LHNameless) for art and updates, and I'll see you soon!
> 
> All of my love, Lucy.


	7. Chassé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I hope that you're enjoying this book, it's a pleasure to write it for you. If you do like it, please show your support and leave kudos/comment/share. Thank you so much Xx
> 
> My love, Lucy.

"If your mum finds out that you're skipping a whole day of class for ballet, she'll never forgive you." Zayn said, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

"You won't tell her, will you?" Louis asked. "Please don't say anything to her. Please." There was a horrible fear behind his words, pain and panic, a whole story that he'd shared too many times in hope that someone would help him—it was a terrible thing to hear from a child so young.

Zayn looked over at Louis. He was dressed in old rags again, clutching his ballet slippers to his chest as if letting them go would be losing a part of himself. "Of course I won't tell her. Your secret is safe with me." He put a hand out and squeezed Louis' shoulder. Louis winced back, and when Zayn turned back to him, he was looking at acrylic nail marks that had been bored into his skin.

"You know.." Zayn started, unwilling to go over the topic of conversation again. He'd tried many times before, but Louis wouldn't listen. "Your mother.. We should report her to the police. I can get you out of th—"

"NO!" Louis shouted, turning to Zayn with the expression of a deer under headlights. "No, don't! Don't make her sad! She'll panic and she'll cry! Don't let the madhouse take her! She's not mad!"

"Louis, she hurts you. She's not fit to be a mother."

Louis' bottom lip was quivering, and he clutched his ballet slippers so tightly that his knuckles turned white. "No, I won't let you take Mother away! She'll be sad and lonely without me! Don't let anyone take her away! _Please_!"

His pleas were so desperate that they sent knives to skewer through Zayn's heart. The young child was punched, kicked, stepped on, hugged, kissed, shoved, beaten, and every other thing that you could imagine.. but despite it all, he would not let anyone take his Mother away from him.

"She's not crazy! She can't go to the madhouse, she'll be so sad." Louis was crying. He was crying the tears that he didn't want to see fall down his mother's face should she be taken away. He cried for her. He panicked and trembled.. for her.

Zayn saw all of that in his eyes then, every part of his panic, his sorrow, his strange and terrible love. All of it was there—the things that had shaped him—and those were the things that he'd not give up for the world.

"Fine." Zayn sighed, but it was not fine. None of this was fine, but there was nothing he could do. He could call the cops over without warning, but Louis wouldn't be able to handle a shock so sudden. After all, he was just a boy.

Zayn tipped his sunglasses down to the tip of his nose when he pulled into the lane where this so-called Mr Harry Styles lived. Last time, Zayn hadn't payed much attention to it, but now that he had a little more time, he drove slower, and admired the place where the rich-folk lived. The road was wide—four lanes divided down the centre by an assortment of pink flowers. Every inch of the pavements was clean, and not a wilted flower or leafless tree was in sight. The buildings were tall, wide, and terraces with swimming pools or deck chairs. Zayn would have loved to live here—anyone would—but his wife refused to let him 'run wild with his money', and so he would just have to remain content with their cosy cottage.

He pulled up to a house on the left, one tucked in the corner of a lane, by a large public garden with pine trees and roses that had crawled over the fence and now invaded a large part of the penthouse wall. "Don't forget to put on sunscreen." Zayn said to Louis as he scrambled out of the car. The boy tripped on the seat belt, did what looked like a pirouette, and managed to land on his feet. Zayn laughed and shook his head. "Here." He said, handing a sun hat to Louis. It was a light blue with Mickey Mouse's face on the side. Louis took it from him. "So you don't get heat stroke."

Louis grinned and put it on. "Thank you." He said, gratefully. "So much."

Zayn nodded at him, "I'll be back at half six. Have a nice time. Work hard."

Louis squealed and hopped from one foot to another. "Have a nice day at work!" he said, and Zayn rolled his eyes, "As if." he said, and then he drove away.

Louis walked up to the house, and realised that he couldn't see a front door. The lower floor consisted of a driveway that dipped below ground, with a white garage doorway, but there was no front door. Louis walked up to where the driveway slopped down, and he sat down there. He didn't know where to knock, and it wasn't as if he could knock on the wall. After a few moments, the garage door played a tune and then it rose. Louis walked the ferrari appear from behind it, then the chandelier, and then Harry who stood at the top of the steps, pressing down a button. Louis stood up and trotted down the driveway, up to Harry who closed the garage door again.

Louis looked at him, and his expression changed. The remainders of the smile that he'd had now ghosted on his face when he looked at Harry, and the excitement of seeing him was fading rapidly. "What's the matter?" he asked, "Have you been crying?"

Harry turned his face away, put a hand on his arm, and wavered there uncomfortably. Louis reached out to him but pulled back. But then, the little boy in plasters did something astonishing. He grabbed Harry and hugged him around the waist. He buried his face into Harry's side, balancing on the staircase while Harry almost fell over, and then Harry's hand was on Louis' arm, another covered his own face, and Louis wouldn't let him go until he'd feel just a little bit better.

"Why are you sad?" He asked, looking up at Harry but his face was turned away. Louis squeezed him tighter.

"Come on." Harry said, "Let's go inside."

Louis did as he was told and followed Harry into the penthouse. He kicked off his shoes and followed Harry into the large room where they sat on the sofa together. Louis waited for Harry to speak up, and looked around the room. His eyes caught sight of something by the telephone. A mug had smashed on the floor, and kitchen towel was soaking up the coffee that had spilt.

Louis looked to Harry and he was crying again. He couldn't see Harry's eyes, but the man was biting his bottom lip and tears slipped down his cheeks. Louis shuffled next to him, and put his head on Harry's shoulder. They remained like that for a while until Louis peered down at Harry's bowed head to see if he'd stopped being sad.

"It's okay to cry, you know." He said, "It's okay to be a little bit broken. Being sad doesn't make you weak."

Harry's tears ran faster, ones that he'd been trying to hold back, Louis saw them and took Harry's hand. His fingers touched something in Harry's palm that made him pull back for a second. A plaster was there—the biggest from the box.

"You kept it?" He asked, when Harry closed his hand around it. "After all of this time?"

Harry squeezed the plaster and brought it to his mouth. He kissed it and said, "I'd not let it go for the world."

Louis looked at his knees, at his hands placed over them, and Harry's hand came out to hold one of them. That simplest thing made the world crack open.

"We must dance." Harry said. He sounded strange when he'd said that, almost as if he were ordering himself, like his life were on the line.

He stood up, holding Louis' hand, and Louis let himself be lead up the stairs to the middle floor where he spotted corridors and rooms with closed doors, and then he was guided up another floor, to a ballet studio. The room was like the studio where he'd go every Monday, but this one was much bigger with mirrors on two sides, huge windows on the other, and the wall where the staircase was enclosed by glass panels was white.

"Wow," Louis gasped. "You really are amazing."

He meant to say, 'you really have an amazing house', but he got his words jumbled up. He was alright with that.

Louis sat on the floor and put on his ballet slippers. He could tie the ribbons perfectly, and he could even stand on the tip of his toes for a few seconds. Harry put on his own ballet slippers, the black ones, and then he tutted at Louis. "Cross the ribbons here, not here." He said, bending down and tying Louis' shoe more securely. He looked at the other one, and Louis tied it himself. "Good. Make sure that it's tight or you'll hurt your ankles."

Harry walked over to the middle of the room, Louis followed, and once that they'd stretched every muscle of their bodies, Harry said, "Do you know the story of Swan Lake? In Ballet?"

Louis nodded, but it was clear that he was unsure. "It's a tragic love story." he said.

Harry agreed, "In act one, a Prince is being congratulated for his coming of age. There is an announcement that he is to wed one of the women that are to be presented to him at the ball the following evening. The Prince gets the idea to shoot one of the swans, and he sets off with his friends to where the swans are, by the lake." Harry stretched his arm, a frown of pain on his face, "In act two, the Prince tells his friends to leave. He is alone with the swans, and Odette—the Swan Princess—appears in human form to tell her story. She is under a spell of a magician. By day, she and her friends are swans. The spell will end when she marries, but until then, only a crown protects her. She end up dancing with the Prince, declaring their love, and then the entire flock joins in."

Harry, while he spoke, kept fidgetting, stretching his leg and arms, while an expression of discomfort passed over his face. "Act three is where you'll play both the part of Odette and Odile. Odile is the magician's daughter who resembles Odette, and at the ball, she catches the Prince's eye. They are declared to be married, but then a swan arrives at the window, and the Prince pushes Odile away and rushes after the swan instead. In the final act, Odette is heartbroken and the Prince is found comforting her by the lake. She forgives him when he explains that he was tricked into thinking that Odile was her. Finally, the Magician appears and demands that the Prince should marry his daughter, or both he and Odette will die. The Prince refuses. The Magician's spell is broken by Odette and the Prince's love for each other, and the other swans become human again."

"Do Odette and the Prince remain dead?" Louis asked, balancing on his tiptoes.

"In this version, yes. In this version, the curtain closes on the dead couple." Louis looked a little sad by this, and Harry smiled sympathetically. "Not all love stories have happy endings. At least they died together. Imagine how sad it would be, should one of them live without.. without the other.."

Louis looked at Harry, and Harry coughed and turned away to the speaker by the wall. "Stand over there." He said, "I will show you the dance."

He pressed the 'play' button, and the song that Louis had listened to so many times before began to play. It was the classic 'Swan Lake' song, from the second act, the scene by the lake.

Harry stood in the middle of the room, his head bowed, fingers pointed, muscles tight, and then he was dancing. And Louis understood why everyone referred to him as the 'King of Ballet'.

Wildflowers grew in the places he tread, stars followed the movements of his arms, and gold dripped from his fingertips. Of all the pretty things, all of the astonishing things, the way that this man danced was by far the most incredible thing that Louis had ever seen. There was no denying it, that he'd earned his name, that he'd earned the crown that was placed on his head, and even if none of those things existed, Louis saw them all. Harry was a true prodigy, he found life when there was none, and he found love in a heart that had been broken too soon.

Yes, that must have been the reason behind his rare talent. He listened to his heart, he trusted his body, and most of all, he danced for a love that fate stripped away.

Harry did a pirouette, or something of the sorts, landed, jumped into the splits, then twirled again until he landed almost silently in front of Louis. He breathed heavily, beads of sweat dripping from his body, and a wide smile of satisfaction was over his face. Louis—who hadn't closed his mouth in the whole time that Harry had danced—finally had enough awareness to clap.

Harry picked up a towel and dropped it over his hair. After drinking from a water bottle that Louis offered him, he said, "That choreography felt... nostalgic."

"You were beautiful." Louis said, frustrated that he couldn't find words deep enough to express how he felt about Harry's performance, "That dancing.. like a butterfly.. You are beautiful, Harry. I want to be beautiful like you."

Harry smiled at him, but it turned sad. "I'm beautiful for all of the wrong reasons. You don't want to be beautiful like me—it's a painful way to live."

*

Louis spun around on a bar stool, holding a Jäger Bomb in his hand, while Harry washed the dishes. It was just after lunch, and even though Louis had discovered that Harry was quite possibly the worst cook in the world, his perception of him didn't change. In Louis' eyes, Harry was an incredible and rare beauty, and he didn't think that anything would ever make him change his mind.

"You're going to fall off." Harry said, and Louis missed the ledge of the table and crashed to the ground with a loud "OW—" Harry laughed and walked around the bar table, looking down at Louis who appeared more confused than hurt, covered in alcohol. "Are you alright?" He asked putting a hand out for Louis.

Louis took it and stood up, rubbing his hip and glaring at the stool. He yelped. Harry, suddenly, had picked him up by the waist and was now sitting him down on the bar table. Louis looked at him in surprise, and Harry smiled, "Do you like marshmallows?" he asked.

"I've never had a marshmallow before." Louis said.

"Really? Are you sure?" Harry said, and upon remembering that there was a possibility that Louis' mother abused and neglected him, he said, "I have a bag of them. Here."

He pulled out a large bag from beneath the bar table and tore it open. Louis swayed his feet, and watched Harry pick out a pink marshmallow. "Marshmallows are a ballet dancer's secret ingredient. This is what makes them dance like the sugar plum fairy."

He held the marshmallow up, Louis opened his mouth, and Harry pushed it in there. He watched his ring fingers slip in and out of Louis' mouth, and then he watched the boy eat the marshmallow. "It tastes like a cloud." Louis said, mouth full.

Harry watched him, distracted by the marshmallow that made Louis' right cheek puff out, and he poked it. He poked Louis' cheek. He quickly realised what he was doing and pulled his hand back. "Ah—uh.." he said, trying to find a credible explanation for what he'd just done. He didn't find anything to say, but Louis poked his cheek back.

"What did you do that for?" Harry asked, touching his face where he could still feel Louis' finger ghost on his skin.

Louis shuffled forward on the table, then locked his legs around Harry's waist. He pulled Harry towards him, turned him around, and then climbed onto his back. "I like you. Do you like me?"

" _Like_ you?" Harry asked, smiling, "I love you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! What did you think of that chapter?
> 
> I hope that you enjoyed it and that you're enjoying the story as a whole! If you have any questions, drop them here and I'll get back to you. Xx
> 
> Please vote, comment, and share for the show to go on.  
> Written with my love, Lucy.


	8. Jeté

Louis sat by his locker, his legs wrapped around his bag, and his nose and mouth pushed forward in concentration while he read his book. It was 'Peter Rabbit' by Beatrix Potter. He'd have liked to read something for older children, he certainly had the intelligence to read whole novels but he couldn't afford to buy himself presents. There was the school library, of course, but he had once been severely bullied in there during his first year by some older girls, and he'd not returned since, despite the fact that those girls had all grown up and were probably living their own separate lives now.

"What are you reading, Dipshit?" Shawn asked, casting a shadow over Louis' book until he couldn't read it any longer. He looked up, and Shawn crouched down. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Shawn took the book from Louis and peered at the cover. "Aren't you a little old for Peter Rabbit?" he asked, holding the book between his index and thumb as if it had been dropped down the toilet.

"No." Louis said, grabbing it back. "It's my favourite."

Shawn shrugged, "Alright then. My favourite is 'Jane Eyre' by Emily Brontë, in case you were wondering."

Louis hadn't been wondering, but now he was. He was wondering if Shawn was making fun of him for reading, and then, upon realising that it was an honest statement, Louis wondered why he was so surprised to learn that this boy knew how to read in the first place.

"That's a rude thing to think." Shawn said, "I can see it in your eyes, you're underestimating me. This is a school full of fucked up kids with fucked up lives, but I'm not illiterate, despite of everything. I read all of the time when I'm at mum's house. At dad's, too. I used to be given books as anger therapy, they really help."

Louis looked down at his book. He could hear Shawn's friends in the background, wolf-whistling and making weird animal noises as all teenage boys seemed to do as a form of entertainment. "When did your parents get divorced?" He asked, hoping that his question wouldn't come across as insensitive.

Shawn sat down properly then, "I was ten." He said, picking at a loose string on Louis' shorts. "But it's okay because they didn't get along very well. Dad was going on and on about rugby all of the time, and mum doesn't like rugby. He was the kind of person to invite her out to dinner and then, when she'd ask 'where?', he'd say 'you decide'. Relationships like that are hard to keep."

"Do you have a new mum or dad? At parents' evening last year, you were with two people."

Shawn nodded, "That must have my dad's missus. He married her last spring. She's incredible and lets me eat the stash of chocolate biscuits that dad hides from me and my little brother. I have a little brother, by the way. Step-brother actually. His name is Josh, but he calls himself Layla."

"I had a bug named Layla once. I squished it by accident." Louis said, and then Shawn snapped the loose string and made him flinch back.

"Woah, calm down." the boy said, surprised to see Louis jump like that. "Where were your parents on parents' evening. I've never seen anyone besides that rich sugar daddy of yours."

"He's not my sugar daddy!" Louis said, appallingly, "His name is Zayn. He's my driver, I've known him since primary school. No one came to parents' evening, that's why you saw no one with me. I only stayed the afternoon because Zayn was too busy to collect me at lunch time."

"Oh, I see. Then.. where are your parents? Are you an orphan?"

Louis looked down, "I don't think so. I'm really.. not sure.." He paused for a moment. Even though he had a mother, he felt alone, and he'd always feel without. "I live with Mother, I've never had a dad."

"What's she like? I've never met your mum."

Louis laughed stiffly, "She doesn't really favour social interaction. She's sort of.." He didn't know how to finish his sentence, as too many terrible memories flooded his mind. He remembered her pushing him down the stairs, slapping him across the face, kicking him with her stiletto heels.. but he remembered the way that she held the cigarette away from his skin, the way that she'd stroked his forehead and placed a kiss there, the way that she call out to him with a voice so sweet that Louis had heard love, but he didn't not understand what love was anymore. Was it pain? Misery? Despair? Was it the blood that hung from her fingertips or the tears that ran down her face? Was love the tingles that drifted through his body when he touched her hand, or was it the relief of letting it go? He didn't understand what love was anymore, and perhaps, because Shawn also hurt him.. Perhaps that he loved Louis, too.

"Sort of what?" Shawn asked,

Louis snapped out of his thoughts and looked at him. "What?" he asked,

"You said that your mum was sort of something, but you never said what."

Louis looked back at his closed book, "Ah, she's sort of over-passionate. She gets just a little too absorbed in the things that she loves. She locks them up in the house and won't let anyone touch them. She'll close the curtains so that no one sees the things that she loves. She won't let those things go for anything. She calls them the pretty things that live in the house. Mother would die for what her pretty thing in the house, but the love that she has for it is destructive."

"The things that she loves.. It's you, isn't it? You're the pretty thing that lives in the house." Shawn said.

He'd finally understood why Louis was covered in plasters from head to toe. He understood why the boy was so child-like, why he cowered back at the slightest quick movement or loud noise. There was a lot of proof that he was owned by his mother, that he was just her possession and something for her to keep her mind at bay. After all of this time, Louis had not been weak, but he was _owned_.

"Can't you get out of there? Why have you not run away?" Shawn asked.

"I have nowhere to go. I can't leave her." Louis said, "If I do, she'll die."

"But if you carry on, then you'll die, and I don't want you to die."

"I don't want to die, either." Louis said, "I want to live on forever. I want to grow up and move in with Harry and have a puppy. When I grow older, I'm going to be an astronaut and fly to the moon. You need to be very clever for that but the teacher said that I can do whatever I dream of doing. She said that if I keep working hard, then I can go wherever I want. I'm already top of the class in a lot of subjects."

"Well, it's true. You are astonishingly clever." Shawn agreed, "I'll grant you that." He paused, frowned, and said, "Who's Harry?"

"Oh, Harry is a butterfly." Louis replied, "The butterfly with a torn wing."

*

Spoons clinked against chipped bowls. Soup spilled down the side of the table and dripped on the cracked tiles of the kitchen floor. It had pooled up on the ground, slipped between each tile and Louis' stomach rumbled when he looked down at it out of the corner of his eye. His bowl was now empty.

"Mother?" Louis said, still holding the spoon in his hand. "Can.. Can I have some of your soup? I couldn't t make any to leave over.."

Mother looked up from her soup, her owlish eyes shifting down to the empty bowl that rolled on its side, and then she pushed her helping towards her son.

Louis grabbed it from her and began to drink the soup with his spoon, but then starvation took over him, and he picked the bowl up and chugged his food as if he'd not eaten in years. When he put it down, he met Mother's eyes.

"Why is your soup on the floor?" She asked. Her own stomach rumbled, but when Louis pushed the bowl back to her, she refused it and insisted, with a flick of her finger, that Louis should have it.

"Mother, you put the soup on the floor. You pushed it away, yourself." Louis said. "The clock on the wall rang eight in the evening, and it frightened you, so you pushed my soup away. You mistook the clock for the doorbell. You thought that the police were at the door to take me away, that is why you were scared. This happened five minutes ago."

"Is that so?" Mother asked, rather sad, picking at her acrylic nails. "Still, you will not leave me, will you? You would never leave dear Mother, I know it. What kind of child would that make you?"

"I would be a wicked child. I would be a a bad and wicked child who did not love his mother. Children who leave their parents go to hell. I must love my family. Children must love their parents."

Louis repeated the words like clockwork. They were not his own, they were not true, but they were the ones that he'd said so many times that he'd come to believe them.

Mother leant over the table, Louis leant back, and then she grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled her son towards her. Her grip was tight, and when she'd placed both hands on Louis' shoulders, the nails that punctured his skin suddenly cracked with the pressure. She cried out, ever so close to Louis that the child froze from fear. Mother retreated to her own side of the table again, looking at her broken acrylics, and ignored how petrified Louis was.

There were really no words to describe the cold flush that ran through Louis' bloodstream, the wide and alert look in his blue eyes, and the trembling of his whole body when he sat on that rickety kitchen chair.

Mother grimaced, and her eyes fell from her fingers to the soup on the floor. "You did that?" she asked accusingly, in a tone of surprise as if she'd only just seen the large puddle by her feet. "I take all of this time to cook a meal for you, and you throw it on the floor?" She looked at Louis. Her fingertips were bleeding—her own nails had torn off as well. Louis stared into her eyes, he really had no other choice, and there was arson in her gaze. No, she was not sane any longer, but she had been once.

The sun was setting outside the Tomlinson cottage, the flowers in the flowerbeds—holding their bright colours so well—trembled in the warm breeze. A starling fluttered down to rest on a cherry tree branch before bursting into song. It was a calm evening in that small village.

All was well.

But behind the curtains of the cottage windows, there was movement in the Tomlinson residence. A woman, in the room, towering over a child. The child screamed so loudly that his voice never even left his lips. He cried, when the shadows loomed over him and the fists, heels, teeth, and every other weapon came to greet him; he just sat there, like he'd just sat there since he could remember, and he asked himself, ' _Will I see the pretty sun rise in the morning?_ '

And his answer, it was clear this time, was 'no'. If he were to sit there, crying, screaming, waiting for some Prince charming to save him, he'd die in his little castle where he was locked away. Louis had always loved fairy tales. He'd always loved the happy ending where the damsel in distress would get rescued from the wicked witch. Perhaps, in the end, that was why he'd waited in his castle for so long. He had been waiting for the right person to come along and take his hand, yet no one had been there, and as Mother struck him across the cheek again and he fell to the ground, mind blurring out, he realised that the reason why no one had come was because he was not a damsel in distress. He had to be his own Prince, because no matter how beautiful those fairy tales were, they were not real, and Louis was not a quitter like those princesses had been.

He kicked his mother in the stomach.

She shouted, although it was mostly out of shock, and fell back until she banged her back on the counter. Her spine cracked horribly loud, Louis—who was still cowering on the ground—could almost see every bone in Mother's body shatter. He was a wicked child for smiling. He was a wicked child for feeling his heart race when Mother fell to the floor. He was a wicked child for scrambling to his feet and backing away to the front door. But most of all, he was a wicked child for opening it and leaving her to scream out his name from within.

*

It was dark, now. Barn owls flew in the sky, and it was only after seeing one land in a nearby tree that Louis realised how they were in fact barn owls, and not angels. A fox ran across the road and made him jump, and a breeze caught him but this time, it was cold. Louis had no shoes on his feet, nor did he have anything to keep him warm besides his oversized shirt and little pair of shorts. He'd been walking for a long time, and his head was throbbing so much that he wavered from side to side on the deserted pavements. His cheek was bleeding, his lower lip stung when he glided his tongue across it, and his shirt clung to him with cold sweat. He could have gone to Granny's house. He could have gone to Zayn's.. There were many places that he could have gone to escape the monster locked in the house, but out of all of those places, the safest was where he wandered.

He tumbled down a steep driveway, crumbling to the ground out of exhaustion and pain, and banged his fist on the white garage door. He heard no one for while, and he banged again and again and again, glancing back up at the road in fear that Mother would come crawling down the driveway. He beat the door with his fist, calling out, until his world turned black.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!
> 
> I hope that you like this chapter, even though it is sad. Please comment what you think, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Xx
> 
> Please share this book if you enjoy it so that more people can read it too, and thank you so much for your love towards this story. You make me so happy and proud to have you.
> 
> Written with my Love, Lucy.


	9. Piqué

**

A tiny orange light danced in a black abyss. Like a butterfly carried by a passing breeze, it floated there in the darkness. It approached, trembling, floating— _warm_. Louis opened his eyes properly, and saw the orange flame of a single candle, sitting on a bedside table.

“Are you awake?” A voice said. It seemed to echo in Louis’ mind, sounding distant as if he were still sleeping. Louis followed it, and by the bedside table was Harry. His hair was down, his elbows pressed into the mattress as he knelt by Louis’ side. A warm towel was in his hand. Louis closed his eyes again. “You found me.. I thought.. that I was going to be outside all night..”

Harry’s hand came to rest on Louis’ forehead, on a plaster that he must have stuck there. Louis had plasters and bandages all over himself, he could feel them, but they weren’t his own. “You’d have to kill me before I could ever leave you outside all night. You’re always welcome here.”

Louis didn’t open his eyes, but he let himself melt into the fluffy pillows and the hand that stroked his face. He’d not felt this warm in a long time, nor had he ever felt so peaceful. “Do you really mean it? That I’m always welcome here?”

“I do.” Harry replied, “If ever you need a place of comfort, just bang on the door, and I’ll come for you.”

“That makes me happy.” Louis said, in a voice so serene that Harry wondered if he were going to sleep again. Louis wondered that, too, but he didn’t want to sleep despite the fact that it must have been late at night. He wanted Harry more than anything in the world. And so, with his eyes still closed out of fatigue, he put his arms out and searched the abyss for his place of comfort, and he found it, and pulled it into a hug.

Harry seemed surprised at first, and tensed up when Louis wrapped his arms around his torso, but then he relaxed and climbed onto the bed, pressing his knee onto the mattress and leaning over so Louis could lie down. Louis lay on his back, moved his arms from Harry’s torso to his neck, and Harry just leant over him. He sat on the side of the bed, hands on each side of Louis’ body, pressed into the mattress, and the boy said, “You smell of soap.”

“It’s shaving foam.” Harry said, “Do I smell bad?”

Louis nuzzled into Harry’s neck and Harry squirmed away awkwardly when Louis sniffed him. Louis opened his eyes, and they were bluer than Harry had ever seen before. “Did you just giggle?” Louis asked, wrinkling his nose.

Harry shook his head, “No, of course not.”

Louis put a bandaged hand out and tugged on one of Harry’s curls to pull him back down, “Yes you did, I heard you.”

Harry followed where Louis’ hand lead him, and he leant over the boy, holding onto the headboard of the bed. He smiled, “Maybe I did.” he admitted, “You should sleep, it’s late.”

Louis’ smiled faded, and Harry watched his face turn from peace to fear to panic to pure terror when he realised the situation that he was in. He pushed Harry back and sat up, eyes wide, heart thumping. “I have to go home.” He said. “Mother is alone. I must leave. I must return to her.” He began to climb out of the bed but Harry pulled him back, dragging Louis into his arms. Louis began to cry out of panic, gripping Harry’s shirt, and Harry rocked him from side to side.

Louis cried loudly, trembled, struggled to breathe, but Harry had experienced this before. He used to get panic attacks when he’d been first diagnosed with bone cancer. His parents would comfort him, Rosaline would as well, and when she kissed him, he’d return to reality.

And he kissed Louis.

Harry grabbed Louis’ face; it was wet with tears and his nose was running and he looked a complete and utter mess, but Harry kissed him with as much love as he’d given to Rosaline, perhaps, although he didn’t know it, he gave Louis more.

Their kiss was not deep, nor was it perfect, but Louis forgot his panic for a moment, and that moment grounded him. Harry pulled away and wiped his lips, then he wiped Louis’ face with the towel, and pushed the boy’s chest until he was laying among the plump pillows of the bed again. “Did that surprise you?” Harry asked, and Louis nodded. “At least, now, your panic attack has stopped.”

“Do you kiss all of your friends?”Louis asked. Harry watched him, his eyes shifting between Louis’ blue ones.

“Not really.” He said, “You’ve never been like them, I don’t think.”

“Are we not friends?” Louis’ voice was shaking, the fear of rejection crawling back to him, but Harry smiled, and every worry suddenly vanished.

“Friends..” Harry said, although it was a reminder to himself. “You were never just a friend. You are the warmth, the adrenaline, the wings, the blooming flowers, the safety.. You are many things, Louis, that make my days better. You were never just a friend.”

Tears of happiness, this time, gathered in Louis’ eyes, and then his bottom lip was trembling, and he threw his arms around Harry. Harry held him back, squeezed the boy’s body, rocked him side to side, and he was crying, as well. But, despite what you may have thought, it was not out of happiness.

*

Sunlight woke Louis up. It hit his face, turning his skin golden and his blue eyes even lighter than they already were. As soon as he felt the warmth of it, Louis smiled. At home, he’d only ever wake up to cold draughts and darkness as Mother never let those moth-bitten curtains part.

However, as he lay there, Louis slowly remembered this warm feeling from a time in the past. It was a strange feeling of déjà-vu, something that he was certain had happened before, and it was only when a cloud passed in front of the sun to create a shadow for a few seconds that Louis remembered.

In a second, his mind had flashed back to a cot, sitting in a bare room with white plastered walls and creaking floorboards. Mould gathered on the ceiling by the door where water had leaked through. Louis could remember standing in his cot, holding onto the rickety bars, and crying. He could remember his stomach growling and a bee hitting the glass of the window in attempt to escape. Dust had gathered in the room, had settled on the floorboards and windowsill, and it floated in the air.

The sunlight was all that came to look after the baby in his cot. It seeped into the room, took the shape of each rectangular windowpane, and hit the cot as if to say ‘good morning’.

Louis had been alone that day, locked in a cot, screaming and crying his heart out for someone to get him out and give him a drink. From the outside, the baby could be heard screeching, and yet no one had been there to listen. He’d been a lonely baby in a lonely room, in a lonely house, in a lonely street where no one but drunks, rapists, and old folk ever walked. It had been a terrible life for someone so young.

Louis’ mother had only returned long after the sun had passed. The night had crawled upon them, but ran and cried when she scooped her son up from the cot. She held him and hugged him and apologized over and over again. The Mother had given her child a kiss, had given him warm milk and honey, and had rocked him to sleep.

‘I’ve been gone for so long, worked so hard, but I still don’t have enough money to feed you. We will have to go hungry, my love..’

Louis could remember falling asleep in her arms, but then, her voice came back to him, and he’d never heard it in so much pain before. ‘He hurt me. I don’t know his name, but he had a rough way on handling the things that he loved. I wanted to work hard for you, to raise more money, but he didn’t give me it. He only gave me bruises and a ten pound note. I wanted to ask for more money, my Darling, I really did. I wanted to tell him about you, about the need to buy your food and nappies and toys, but if he were to find out that one of his girls had a child, he’d send out his men to kill us. Men like that are dangerous, Louis. Please, don’t let them find you. Please, work hard at school so you never need to be affiliated with them. Please, don’t ever go out of my sight.’

Louis suddenly sat up in bed, heart pounding. He’d forgotten this woman, this person that had sacrificed everything she’d ever had for her son, and yet he still lived with her. Those men that she’d spoken of were old gang members who’d hire prostitutes. Mother had never attended school because her parents had been horribly sick and she’d been at home to look after them. But they’d both had dementia, and as Mother had grown older, her parents forgot all of the help that she’d given. They’d called her ‘ungrateful’ and ‘unloving’, and they’d thrown her out of the house. Mother had been assaulted many times by many people, and then somewhere along the way, Louis had been born.

It all made sense, now. Louis realised that Mother was afraid to leave the house because she feared those men. She was petrified of Louis leaving her in case her beloved child would never return home. But most of all, her obsession with him had surely come from the fact that he had been the only one in the whole world to love her without giving her any pain.

Louis sat there for a long while, staring at nothing at all, just trying to remember his mother, trying to remember her before she became the horrible thing that lived in the house. He didn’t find any other memory, but that single flashback had been enough to prove that Mother had treasured him once.

He clambered out of bed and pulled the sheets back up. The corner of the other side of the duvet was turned over and the trace of someone’s head was formed a dip the pillow. An empty bottle of water lay on the bedside table beside it, and a picture of a woman was there; Louis walked up to it and picked the picture up. She was beautiful, Rosaline, and there was no doubt in Louis’ mind that it was her. She seemed young, perhaps a little older than Louis, but no more than twenty. She had skin so fair that she looked as if the sun had never touched her. Her eyes were blue and looked just like Louis’, and yet her hair was long and jet black, formed into loose curls that rested on her shoulders. She wore a gold ring on her finger, and a dress of white swan feathers. Louis looked at the ring for a long while, observed the imprint of a heart in it, and then he pondered for a bit, and pulled the bedside table’s drawer open. A few books were in there, a small pack of unmentionable items that had not been opened, a worn out teddybear with ballet slippers on, and a tiny red velvet box. Louis nodded. He knew that he’d find it here, that Harry’s love for Rosaline was too strong to let such a thing go. And so the boy glanced at the bedroom door, and he opened the box.

A matching gold ring with the imprint of a heart stared back.

*

A loud crashing noise coming from above made Louis quickly put the box back and pretend as if he’d never even opened the drawer. He heard Harry shout in either anger or frustration, or perhaps both, and then another loud crash made the walls tremble. Louis followed the sound to the ballet studio. He crept up the stairs, silently, and poked his head over them to see Harry sitting on the floor in his ballet attire, looking stressed and angry with both the world and himself. He sat there for a long time, panting, face twisted in pain, but Louis couldn’t see what hurt.

After a moment, Harry stood up, bent over himself, teeth clenched, and then he stretched his arm out and growled again. He was in so much pain that tears ran down his cheeks, and Louis was so shocked to see him in this state that he didn’t even think to go up and help.

Slowly the pain passed, and Harry stopped panting and stretching and crying, and it was only then that he saw Louis. He stood up straight and looked away. Louis decided that it was time to intervene, and he pushed the glass door to the ballet room open.

“I heard a loud noise..” He said, walking up to Harry cautiously. “Are you alright? Did you fall?”

“How long have you been standing there?” Harry growled. Louis was alarmed by his tone of voice and took a step back.

“I just got he—”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I apologize.” Harry interrupted. He turned back to Louis and gave him a smile, putting a hand out. Louis took it carefully, and Harry knelt down in front of him. “Did you sleep well?” He asked, “Would you like some breakfast?”

Louis did want some, but he had something that he needed more. “I have to go home.” He said, “Mother is afraid.”

*

It took a lot of convincing to get Harry to agree, but Louis finally managed to go back to his little cottage. Harry watched him from the car, and Louis felt that concerned gaze on him while he turned the doorknob. He pushed the door open, poked his head around it, and no one made a sound. He shut it, and suddenly felt very scared. Had he killed Mother? If he were to go into the kitchen, would she be rigid on the floor? That thought terrified him, hurt him, and it was that pain of losing Mother that made him almost smile when he saw her asleep on the sofa.

He sat down on the floor, and then, he coughed.

Mother stirred, her blue eyes opened, and in a split second of seeing her son, she lunged at him. Louis scampered back over the floorboards. Mother crawled towards him. “Are you alright, Mother?” he asked, trying with all of his little heart to not sound afraid.

“Where were you?!” She snarled, “Why did you leave Mother alone?!”

And Louis shook his head, backed into the corner of the room. He was terrified, it was written all over him, but despite of that, he smiled. “Mother, what do you mean?” He said, “I have been here all along.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that you liked it, I'm not sure how clear this chapter was to understand because I feel like it wasn't, so just drop any questions that you have and I'll get back to you X
> 
> A/N in case you didn't understand:  
> \- At the end of the chapter, Louis is just messing with his mother's mind because he knows that she forgets things. He just convinced her that he'd been there all along and had never left.   
> \- Louis' mother was a gang prostitute because she had no money nor the experience to find a job that could pay enough to raise her son correctly. She is scared that gang members will find her and kill Louis so she doesn't leave the house anymore to avoid that. She is now still a prostitute, but does not serve the gang anymore.  
> \- The ring in Harry's bedside table drawer was his engagement ring to Rosaline. Louis had seen him wearing it on the first day that they met. He hadn't seen it since.


	10. Cambré

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I hope that you'll enjoy this chapter. It will include more of Harry's background as well as some of Louis'.
> 
> Please leave comments, votes, and please share it social media Xx

***

“It’s so cold.” Louis said, shivering when a gust of wind caught him. He could hear the grass and wildflowers rustle over the moors. Large puddles had gathered where the earth dipped, brown and cold, and Louis took great joy in jumping in them. The sky over the moors had turned from white to a deep grey, and the clouds passed through at great speed. It was to rain, soon, Louis smelt the water nearing, along with the sounds of the cattle grazing in the endless fields and—when the wind blew in the right direction—he smelt Harry’s aftershave.

Louis jumped into another small puddle that was hidden between grass-covered lumps of soil, and he laughed when the water splattered up his bare legs. Harry watched him, unsure. He was unsure of Louis’ laughter, if it came from the joy of jumping in puddles or of having wellies and a new coat after years of wearing the same outfits. Those wellies that Louis wore, ladybug red and black, were ones that he’d vowed to never take off except to wear his ballet slippers. When he’d unwrapped the yellow anorak and retrieved it from the bag that Harry had given him, he’d smiled so truly that Harry had wondered if this boy had ever worn a coat before.

Harry smiled then, feeling the cold wind blow his curls in his eyes, and he took off his scarf. When he pulled Louis out of the puddle and wrapped the scarf around his neck, he realised that he no longer minded the cold, for Louis’ happiness was the only thing that he needed to feel warmth. The boy looked up at him, confused when Harry tied a knot in the end of the scarf, and his eyes matched it perfectly. “So blue.” Harry said, pushing Louis’ fringe aside. “The bluest I’ve ever seen.” He then stood back up straight as the first drops of rain began to fall on the moors. “Are you warm?” he asked, “You won’t catch a cold, will you?”

Louis shook his head, “This scarf smells like you.” He said, and then he pushed it up to his nose to sniff it. Harry took his wrists and lowered his arms, “Please, stop doing that.” He laughed.

“But I like your smell. It reminds me of you. Of when you kissed me.”

Rain fell on Louis’ stripy rain-hat and slid down to drip into the muddy puddle. Harry let it fall in his hair. Cold. “Did you like the kiss that much?” He asked, smiling, still holding Louis’ wrists but neither of them realised it. Harry saw the tip of Louis’ nose turn pink, and he leaned in, beneath Louis’ rain-hat, and buried his face into the scarf to find the boy’s cheek. It was warm when he kissed it, pink and squishy. Harry kissed it again.

While he did, the grey clouds burst open, and the rain that had dripped now poured. It felt as if buckets of water were being thrown on them, but neither of them cared. They were alone on the moors where Harry had spent his childhood. During the winter, he’d spent his days at his grandparents’ farmhouse, sledging down the fields, building snowmen around the farmhouse, and looking after the lambs in the barn. During the warmer seasons, when the nights were long, he’d go with Grandpa to feed the sheep and the cattle, and to see the tiny white lambs being born. It had been a quiet childhood, the happiest he could have ever wished for, when he’d been out on the moors, and that was where he’d learnt to dance freely. Harry’s Grandparents were country folk, and had never enjoyed too much company, and so—exiled from the village that was a twenty minute walk away—they’d built their lives around these fields and the wildlife. Harry had learnt to love animals—he’d fed sheep, watched birds, and fed baby foxes that had been left without a mother. He’d had a whole other life out here, a life of peace, and perhaps that was why he wanted Louis to share it with him.

And so, they both laughed in the rain-showers. Their clothes were soaking, their hair dripping, they were blinded by the water that fell on their faces, but they held each others hand, and that was company. All that they ever wanted was each other’s company.

“Can you see that over there?!” Harry shouted over the wind and rain. He pointed to something brown in the distance, tucked away in the moors’ hills. Louis peered at it, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “That’s my Grandparents’ house!”

“Are they in?!” Louis shouted, rain standing on his eyelashes. Harry shook his head, saddened, and it didn’t take long for Louis to guess why.

“Let’s go there. I’ll make you a hot chocolate by the fire!” Harry said, a smile returning to his face. He stroked Louis’ cheek, and then shook his head, like a dog, splashing everything around him with water. Louis put his hands up and laughed, before following Harry down the moors to the little farmhouse, tucked away in the middle of nowhere. He could see that Harry struggled to walk over the soft earth and bumps in the soil. He tripped often, his prosthetic catching on every thick tangle of grass, but he never lost his smile. Not once.

After a long trudge back through the wind and rain, Harry and Louis finally reached the little farmhouse in the clearing. It was made of old brick—as most farmhouses were—and had a little barn to the side of it. A white brittle fence surrounded it, and stepping stones lead to the front door. Surrounding the house were high hills, and both Louis and Harry paused in wonder when they saw the thick country mist begin to tumble over the top of them like white waterfalls.

“Come on.” Harry said, dragging Louis behind him as they ran through the rain. They clambered over the stile in the white fence, hopping on every stone of the path, and they finally reached the old front door. Silver chimes rang above it, and Louis giggled like a child when he listened to their music. He’d missed out on these sounds as a baby, and he put his hands up to touch the chimes before Harry stopped him. “Don’t. You’ll disrupt their music. Let them sing to you.”

He turned a huge rusted key in the lock, and the door opened loudly. The musky scent emerged from within the house, but instead of neglect, the smell made Louis think of an old woman peeling potatoes over a saucepan, and an old farmer returning from the fields with a sheepdog in tow. It was a peaceful thing, a pleasant smell, and Louis was ever so glad to have skipped his Monday at school to follow Harry here instead. Wherever ‘here’ was. Louis had never been out of his own little village except to go to town. The furthest away from home where he’d ever gone had been on a school trip to a farm when he was only seven, but he couldn’t remember that, at all. The only animals that he’d ever seen were domesticated, or beheaded on the shelves in the butchers. He couldn’t remember country animals, had never seen wildlife, and he wanted to, Harry was sure that he’d love it.

“Take you wellies off, you’ll tread mud everywhere.” Harry told Louis, when the boy stepped onto the ‘welcome’ mat. Louis wiggled them off, looking around the room. It was small, cosy, the bricks on the outside also lined the walls within, and pictures hung there. There were photos of an old man holding a baby goat in his arms, pictures of an old lady in a flowery cotton apron feeding a baby lamb out of a bottle. Pictures of Harry’s parents were there as well, and Louis recognised them from the magazines that he’d read. Harry’s mother had been as beautiful back then as she was now, with her brown curls and pale skin and green eyes. Harry’s father looked like a lot like the old couple who’d lived in this house. He had the same country look about him, the same creases in the corners of his eyes, the same dimples as his mother, and the same smile as his father.

Among all of those pictures, Harry was also there—the boy with the curls, he was. Louis had never seen a childhood like this, one so happy and peaceful, and he felt jealousy. It hurt him to think that it was possible to be so happy at such a young age, and it hurt even more to think that he’d never be able to experience the happy life that he’d missed out on.

“Go on. You’re about to burst from curiosity. Take a look around.” Harry insisted, upon seeing Louis look at the walls. He took the boy’s hat, scarf, and yellow anorak, and watched Louis scamper away, mouth open, admiring everything that he saw. He’d always been like this, ever since Harry had met him—one to see every little thing with wonder and passion and nothing less than that. Louis degraded nothing, he was cruel to no one, even though the world had damaged him so much. Louis was a rare and wonderful person, and should the world actually take the time to stop and admire what he was really like, it would be amazed by what it would find.

Louis came to stop in the middle of a room with too many walls. Behind him, in the entrance, he heard Harry grunt in pain again. A fireplace awaited in a corner, in front of that sat a sofa with an old floral print on it. To Louis’ right was a kitchen area, with an old chipped table, old chipped chairs, and wooden counters and cupboards along the wall. To his left was a spiral, carpeted staircase, and a pantry with a mustard-coloured curtain.

“Oh, you’ve made a puddle on the floor. Harry said, draping a blue towel over Louis’ head. “You’re cold. I’ll fill the bath for you. It’s an old tin bath, I hope that you don’t mind.”

“Tin?” Louis asked. Harry nodded; “My Grandparents were quite old fashioned. Besides, plumbing doesn’t reach out here. When I was a boy, I used to sit in a tin bucket by the fire. Even as small as you are, I don’t think that you’d fit in a bucket. Don’t worry, though, I’ll get you nice and warm.”

“What about you? You’re cold, too.” Louis asked, following Harry up the spiral staircase.

“I can have a bath after you.”

“Can’t you have a bath with me?” Louis said, watching Harry’s ankles as he walked up the stairs. The prosthetic squeaked loudly.

“A bath with you?” Harry repeated calmly. He reached the top of the stairs, and two white doors awaited on either side of a dusty bookshelf. He opened the one to his left and Louis followed him into the room.

“Well, you’d have to reheat the water again. So I was thinking, have a bath with me.” Louis looked around the bathroom. The wooden floor had been painted white, the bricks on the walls had, too, and little nautical knick-knacks decorated it. He saw the tin bath, and peered into it. It was a tall bath, but narrow at the bottom.

“I would have to reheat the water.” Harry said. “It’s all heated by firewood and kettle water. I suppose that I should have a bath with you. It’s a shame that we don’t have more time. That we can’t stay all night. I would have loved to show you the stars. At night, foxes come out, and hedgehogs too.”

“Are there deer?” Louis asked, eyes glistening in wonder. He’d never seen a deer, and he wanted to. To him, deer were like unicorns, and he wanted to see a real life deer more than anything.

Harry smiled, putting a hand on Louis’ head and stroking it. “Many of them.”

*

Louis sat in the tin bath, water up to his neck, and then he slid under the water, blew some bubbles, and emerged with his hair in front of his eyes. Harry laughed from the edge of the bathtub, and then laughed again when Louis splashed him. “Stop, Louis, that’s not fair.” He said raising his hands in front of him as a shield. Louis laughed with him and leant on the side of the tin bath, looking at Harry and smiling peacefully, “Then come in here with me.”

Harry shook his head, “I can’t.” He said.

“I’m not afraid of you, you know. You’re not any less of a person because you’re incomplete. The world loves you for your heart, for your smile, for your love.. not for what you look like, but even that is beautiful.”

“But, it’s weird. It would creep you out.” Harry said, dragging a finger along the ridge of his prosthetic beneath his jeans.

“Your fear is stopping you from being free. If you don’t give me a chance, you’ll always be trapped like this. Don’t let fear stop you. Ever. If you do, then you’ll never be free, you’ll never fly, and you have places to go.”

Harry looked doubtful, but Louis pulled his hand from the bubbles and touched the man’s cheek. He pushed those wet brown curls behind Harry’s ear and smiled at him. “Do you trust me?” he asked, and it was only then that Harry smiled back, resting his face in Louis’ hand.

“I trust you.”

‘ _What if we could find someone that Harry would dance with? Surely there must be someone that he trusts enough?’_

‘ _If there were one person left in the world that he would be willing to dance with—it’s Louis.’_

“What are you thinking?” Harry asked, “Did I say something wrong?”

Louis blinked, looked at Harry, and shook his head with a smile. “It’s lonely in here without you. Ducky is sad.” He picked up a worn out rubber duck and Harry smiled when he remembered all of the times that he’d played with it.

“Actually, his name is Gerald.” He nodded at the duck and pulled his shirt off. It splattered on the ground in a wet pile of rainwater and mud, but he didn’t care. He stood up, and unbuckled his jeans. He pulled them down slowly, hesitantly, and sat back on the rickety chair when they reached his knees. Louis’ eyes were on him, but as strange as it was, Harry felt no judgement. He pushed his jeans down, exposing the prosthetic, and—after kicking off his socks—he took his jeans off completely. He pulled down his boxers, took off his necklaces and placed them in the windowsill. Outside, the mist was gathering, and the sheep had come down from the moors’ hills to take cover around the farmhouse. Harry turned to his prosthetic and jumped when he saw Louis’ fingers feeling it. He flinched back, and Louis did, too, but then both of them came back to one another. Louis moved his hand down the leg, and found a button by the ankle.

“Push it.” Harry said, and Louis did as he was told. The prosthetic clicked, and Harry pulled it off. He then removed the first layer of material, and a second one with a sharp pin awaited beneath. His fingers slipped beneath the band, and he hesitated once more. There was only one layer between Louis’ eyes and his amputated leg. Only one layer.

“No fear is greater than just before you let it go. Once that it’s been overcome, it’s not so terrifying after all.” Louis said.

Harry looked at him, and the boy smiled. “I promise you that.”

And so, the King of Ballet slipped the material down, and he pulled the remainders of his prosthetic away. He looked at Louis, terrified of the reaction, but as Louis looked at his leg, at the limb cut off just below the knee, there was no fear, no judgment, no disgust, and Harry began to wonder why he’d been keeping it hidden for so long.

Sure those blue eyes stayed on Harry’s leg as he slid into the bath, but they were not cruel like he’d believed all of this time. Perhaps, in the end, it was just curiosity, and the feeling of being observed like a wild beast in a cage was all part of Harry’s imagination. Louis had always known it, and now Harry understood as well, that difference was not always feared but wondered. And wonder comes from wonderful things only.

“It’s warm.” Harry said, sinking into the bath water. He dipped under it, and emerged again, feeling the heat sizzle on his cold skin. Steam shivered over the surface of the water and floated up to hide the reflections in the mirror and the view outside the window. Harry could feel Louis’ body beneath the water. He was sitting cross-legged, taking up as little space as a puppy in a great dane’s basket. Harry put a leg out and rested it over Louis’ thigh. He kept his amputated leg tucked away, but Louis frowned and searched for it beneath the bubbles. His fingers touched Harry’s skin, and the contact made tingles run through Harry’s body. “Stretch your legs, you’ll get stiff joints.” Louis said, pulling Harry’s leg out and resting that one on his other thigh. Harry felt uncomfortable, but when Louis returned to piling bubbles on the Gerald’s head, he relaxed, and he smiled.

To think that someone who thought so lowly of themselves, someone who thought that no one in the world loved them, someone who would get surprised when they’d receive kindness.. To think that someone like that could be so important, could change someone’s life so much and in such a short amount of time was incredible. Yes, Louis Tomlinson was a wonder, and there was no greater word to describe him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!
> 
> What did you think of that chapter and the characters? I'd love to hear what you think of this story and what some of your theories are/ what you make of it. (I have a weak spot for people who analyse my story, honestly it makes me really happy idk)
> 
> Again, I hope that you liked this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please leave kudos, comment, and share.
> 
> With my love, Lucy.


	11. Penché

*

The fire crackled and popped, sending ash to burn out on the tiles. Harry lay on the old, worn sofa, with a woollen blanket over himself. It was itchy, not soft in the slightest, but it held the heat on his body well, and that was why Louis could be found buried beneath it, as well. He lay on Harry, his head on Harry’s chest, and he was ever so warm, smelling ever so sweet. Harry wrapped an arm around the boy’s waist, holding a mug of hot chocolate in the other, and he kissed the top of Louis’ head. That was all he could see, for the rest of the boy was hidden beneath the woollen blanket.

The rainstorm had calmed, and the rain fell less ferociously than before, draining down the gutters and making the moorlands soaked with mud. The sheep had taken shelter in the barn, and Harry could hear them bleating. He was glad that the animals still lived here, even after his Grandparents’ deaths. The villagers, despite barely ever seeing the old couple, respected them highly, for their chickens had lain the best eggs, and their cows had produced the finest milk. That was why, every morning, the villagers would wander the moors and let the cattle out, take the chicken eggs, and look after the baby lambs in the spring. They knew Harry, loved him as everyone ever did. Harry had always been loved by everyone that had ever crossed his path, and he loved those people in return, despite not ever showing it.

Harry saw the hot chocolate in his mug begin to tremble, and he lay it down on the tiles as to not drop it. He let out a sound of discomfort, stretched his arm, but no matter how much he did, that pain didn’t leave. His hand clenched around Louis’ waist, without him realising it. He grimaced out of pain, stretching his left arm and shaking it but nothing ever stopped that pain but the passing of time, and time passed slowly. Ever so slowly.

“Harry?” Louis asked, poking his head out from the blanket. His hand was on his hip, gripping to Harry’s fingers that dug into his skin. His face was pink from the heat beneath the blanket, and he had the marks of Harry’s shirt on his face. “Are you alright?” He asked, sitting up when he saw how heavily Harry breathed. Harry couldn’t reply for a few minutes, his cheeks heated, his breaths heavy, his arm going limp and falling down by the side of the sofa. Occasional splinters of pain crawled through him and it showed on his face. Louis couldn’t see what hurt, and he didn’t dare to touch any part of Harry’s body but his hips which he was straddling already. It scared him to see Harry like this, yet it was not quite as new as that. Harry, for the past few weeks, had been getting slower. His dances were not so perfect. His movements were not so fluid. He’d run out of breath easily, nowadays, would trip more, and he’d struggled to hold Louis in the air for the amount of time that he should have. Everyone had noticed how the King of Ballet was falling, how the crown on his head was slipping, but he denied it. He denied everything wrong with himself, and he danced, with that pain getting deeper, with his self-trust growing thin—he danced, and he never stopped.

“Please, answer me.” Louis begged, panic on his own face, “Can you hear me? Harry?”

Harry growled in pain and stretched his back, his head drooping over the armrest, and then he relaxed, groaned, and the lines of his face became less strained. Beads of cold sweat covered his forehead, and he let out one last cry of—not pain—but misery, before looking up at Louis and smiling slightly. “You really are a loud little thing... I hear you.” He put a hand out weakly, and fondled a strand of Louis’ hair before moving his hand to the boy’s nape and pulling him back down. Louis followed, and lay his head on Harry’s chest.

His heart was racing, but was it the remains of pain—or was it fear?

Louis didn’t know, but Harry did.

“Can I give you a kiss?” Louis asked, looking up with those big blue eyes. Harry saw Louis’ need, the one to comfort, and so he nodded. Louis wriggled up Harry’s body, and then put his face in the crook of Harry’s neck, sniffing the aftershave. He was certain that it was soap. Harry, this time, didn’t tell him to stop, and instead, he leaned his head the other way, inviting Louis to his neck, his jawline, and Louis left kisses there. He moved up, marking a path over Harry’s skin with love. He reached Harry’s cheek, and the man smiled. Louis poked a dimple, then kissed it, and then kissed it again.

Harry’s arms came to wrap around Louis’ waist, and they stayed like that for a while. Harry felt the ghosts of Louis’ lips on his neck, and even though the boy had laid back down on his chest, the tingling feeling still remained on Harry’s flushed cheeks.

“I like Dorian Gray.” Louis said, squeezing Harry as if he were a huge teddy bear.

Harry looked down at him, “Who?” he asked.

“Dorian Gray.” Louis repeated, despite the fact that Harry had heard perfectly well the first time. “He’s a beautiful man. As pretty as a portrait.”

Harry didn’t reply for a moment, but Louis expected him to, so he said, “Ok. That’s nice.”

Louis looked up, confused by the bland reaction, and he saw a crease between Harry’s eyebrows and the stubborn look on his face. He wondered what it meant. “You do know Dorian Gray, right? The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s a book by Oscar Wilde.”

The crease between Harry’s eyebrows disappeared and a small smile turned the corners of his mouth upwards. “I don’t read.” he admitted. “Do you like books, Louis?”

Louis nodded eagerly. He loved to travel, to escape Mother without the punishment, and reading was the only way that he knew how. Harry smiled and patted Louis to make him get off the sofa. He did, and watched Harry walk away, up the stairs. He returned shortly after with a book in his hands. “I was looking for a story, and it seems as if I’ve found Dorian for you. You can have it, if you want.”

Louis took the book from Harry and opened it. He smelt the pages. They were worn with age, dusty, turning yellow, but it was a story, and Louis had always loved stories. He sat back down on the sofa, Harry sat beside him, and they looked at the book in Louis’ hands. “Can I read it to you?” Louis asked.

“Of course.” Harry pulled the blanket over Louis’ shoulders, then over his own, and the boy shuffled up to him. He opened the book, and smiled.

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim—” Louis read. Harry watched his eyes move across the page, the small smile that he had when he spoke, and it may have been a little cruel, but Harry completely forgot to listen to the words that were being read, just for him. He heard them, alright, in a light and peaceful voice, one that spoke with no doubt nor hesitation, with no stumble nor stutter, and yet Harry made no sense of the words. He just listened to the flow of Louis’ voice, and it grounded him.

They grounded each other.

Louis suddenly paused, thoughtful over a sentence in the book. “All art is quite useless.” He repeated, “Is it? Is it really so useless?” He didn’t ask Harry, but a million thoughts ran through his mind that made his voice even softer when he spoke. “If it were useless, we’d never have met. If it were useless, you’d have never leant how let Rosaline go. Art to be admired is useless, for sure, but art within yourself is precious beyond all things.” He trailed off, holding the open book, in deep thought. He started when Harry called out his name, and then he fell back to reality and smiled. “I’ve just realised, Rosaline is a beautiful name.”

Harry nodded, love in his heart and dripped from the green of his eyes. “She was French, it’s an old name. She was named after a character from Romeo and Juliet. She was clever like you, you know, always with her nose stuck in a book. She was a romantic, only read love stories with happy endings, and she used to choreograph her own dances to tell those stories.”

“When did you meet her?” Louis asked, folding the corner of the book cover.

Harry paused for a moment, but said, “I met her in high school. She was girl that everyone admired, the one to turn heads when she’d pass the door. Her beauty was something that you couldn’t miss, but she’d never looked back to those who’d stared. She always kept her nose buried in a book, and would only put that book down to tie her ballet slippers and dance with the school’s ballet club. That’s where I met her. I was the captain of the basketball team that trained on one side of the gym. Of course, there was a lot of flirting going on at that time. The dancers were the swans, tall and beautiful, and the basketball players were the huntsmen, and we chased those swans. Some of us were lucky, we won the girls hearts, and I was the luckiest of them all to be loved by her.”

“She made you start ballet lessons, didn’t she?”

Harry nodded. His heart was heavy, ever so heavy.

“She’s a beautiful person. Far more beautiful than Odette.”

“You don’t know her.” Harry said.

Louis looked up at him, wide eyes. “I don’t need to.” He said, “You smile when you think of her.”

Harry watched Louis fidget. He was tugging on a loose string in the blanket, unravelling it. Harry took his hands and pulled them away. He held them for a while. Both of Louis’ hands could fit in just one of his. “You’re doing it again, comparing yourself to her. You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

Louis looked down. He pulled his hands from Harry’s grasp to stick the large pink and white plaster back onto his knee. The corners bounced back up. Harry looked at him, concerned. “You don’t need to compare yourself to others. You aren’t Rosaline, and that doesn’t make you any less of a person. People love you for who you are. You’re a wonderful boy, Louis, just give yourself the chance to accept it.”

“What if I can’t?” Louis asked, “What if I don’t see what you do? I may be a wonder to you, but when I look in the mirror, I see something like a parasite. I grew up feeling like a lodger in my own home, like something unwanted. I hope that this doesn’t sound weird or anything, please don’t judge me.. When I was eight, Mother tried to shoot me.”

He look up then, and there were terrifying memories etched all over his face. Harry saw a child then, just a child who’d had no one to love him. “It was on my birthday and we were locked in an attic somewhere. It wasn’t my home. There was banging on the front door, men shouting on the other side. Mother was crying and that made me cry too. She kissed my head, and pointed a gun where where her lips had touched me, and she was telling me that she loved me, that I’d sleep well. She said ‘goodnight’ over and over, but she didn’t shoot the gun. She wanted to _kill_ me.”

He burst into tears, and Harry wrapped his arms around Louis’ shoulders and pulled him to his chest. The number of times that he’d had to do this was far too many for a boy like Louis. Harry wanted to make an offer, wanted Louis to live with him, to escape the city and live forever in this little farmhouse of theirs. But he couldn’t.

The endless throbbing in his left arm stopped him. The endless ache in his legs told him “ _don’t._ ”.

“What happened after that?” Harry asked when Louis began to calm down. He regretted asking that question but then he didn’t. Louis had the stern eyes of a soldier, and the strong heart of one, too.

“After that, the angry men broke the door down, and mother pushed me back. She left the attic, locked me in.. I don’t know what happened after that, I was unconscious because of the dust. All that I remember is waking up on in my own home, on the sofa, to see mother’s smiling face and her hand stroking my forehead. Her face was cut and bruised, one of her eyes was swollen shut. She never opened the curtains or went outside again.”

*

There were new plasters on Louis’ arm when he walked into school the next day. He’d got home just a little too late, just five minutes after his curfew, and all of those five minutes had earned him a nail scar each. He looked tired, sad, perhaps, and he didn’t carry his head as high as he usually would. Nothing had particularly happened to Louis, other than the fact that the day before had been one of his favourites, and he was sad that it had ended, but that wasn’t the reason why his head hung so low, now. In fact, he couldn’t think of a reason, it was just a bad day—one of those where he didn’t feel quite like himself. It was only when Shawn walked up to him and called him by his new name, ‘Louis’, that he smiled.

Shawn walked up to him, his ginger hair a mess, his shirt buttoned up wrong, and his tie loose. His friends stood smoking by the gates, chatting to each other and whistling to Shawn. Louis looked away from them when the boy stopped in front of him. “Hello.” Shawn said.

“What do you want from me?” Louis asked suspiciously, “You want my sandwich, don’t you? Take it, it’s in the same pocket of my bag as it always is.” He said, turning around and offering his bag to Shawn.

Shawn appeared taken aback, then puzzled, and finally, he shook his head and spun Louis back around. “No, no, it’s yours. Keep it. I was wondering if you’d like to come to the park with me. Your lessons start in an hour, right? We have the time.”

“Why?” Louis asked.

Shawn rubbed his neck and looked back at his friends rather desperately. They gave him a mixture of middle fingers and thumbs up, and Shawn turned back to Louis. “There’s a lake there, with swans. I thought that you’d like to see them.”

“I’ve seen them before.” Louis said, “But alright. You’re not going to push me in, are you? You’re not going to fill my bag with rocks and push me into the water, are you? You don’t have anyone waiting at the park gates to ambush me and beat me, do you? What if I go there and you have a dog waiting to attack me, or what if—”

“Louis!”

Louis looked up from the ground and saw the shock pass over Shawn’s face. “I would never do any of those things.”

Louis mumbled a quick, “Not anymore..”, before agreeing to Shawn’s offer cautiously. If he were to wait here, he’d be alone for an hour anyway because Niall always arrived at nine on Tuesdays.

*

Louis sat on a swing, and it creaked when he swung gently on it, sucking on an ice cream. He had a hundreds-and-thousands, and Shawn had chosen a vanilla ice-cream with a chocolate flake in it. He now sat on the swing beside Louis, his backpack on the floor, eating his ice cream without a care in the world.

“Where are you going next year?” He asked, licking the vanilla from around his lips.

Louis licked a trail of strawberry juice that ran down his arm and shrugged. “I wanted to go to university to study biological sciences. I wanted to then go to Nasa, or the European Space Agency; that’s how people become astronauts, you know.. But I can’t.”

“Because of your mum?” Shawn asked, and Louis nodded.

“But imagine if I were an astronaut. I would go to the moon and float around in space, and I’d collect moon rocks to give to all of my friends. I’d give you one, and you could keep it on your bedside table at night to have dreams about aliens.”

Shawn laughed and lit a cigarette. With it tucked between his lips, he said, “You sure have great ambitions. Dreamers like you make people like me seem boring. It’s not such a bad thing. They say that realists are here to ground dreamers, but I would rather see you fly with your dreams. Realists are just a pathetic excuse to cut the wings of dreamers.”

“I think that you could be a dreamer, you know. I think that if you want to live, to be happy, then you become a dreamer. I want to live, I want to meet aliens and travel the world and fly to the moon. I want to go to America and then to France and also to Australia. I want to give moon rocks to people and then meet the Queen. There’s a lot of things that I need to do, if I were to die soon, then I’d die sad. I couldn’t imagine dying now, there’s too much that I have left to do.”

Shawn smiled, blowing the smoke from his cigarette out through his nose. “You’ll go far, Louis. You can do anything that you want. I promise you that, and I never break my promises.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!
> 
> What did you think of the chapter?
> 
> Q&A: If you have any questions about this chapter or any part of the story in general, just drop them here and I'll get back to you!
> 
> My love, Lucy. Xx


	12. Battement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "True love corrupts innocence, but not only in a sexual way."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry for the wait, I had a lot of writing work to do so I had to take a little break from these books. I hope that you'll enjoy this chapter, however.
> 
> Please leave comments, I've missed you all because I've been inactive. Also, if you have any questions, just ask.
> 
> With love, Lucy.

Louis sat at his desk by the front of the room, scribbling away the answers to the equations as easily as if he were writing his own name. The only time he stopped working was when he pushed his fringe away from his face to pin it back with a pink butterfly clip that a girl had given to him the day before.

His mouth and nose were pushed forward in concentration, a crease almost forming between his brows, and then he smiled, obviously thinking about something completely unrelated to his work, despite the fact that he enjoyed it. Niall watched him from the other side of the room where he'd been banished to after chattering too much.

There seemed to be something about Louis that had changed since he'd began ballet lessons. He'd finally done what he'd wanted to do for as long as he could remember—and that was to dance—but he was also uncovering parts of himself that Niall didn't think even Louis himself understood. He had always been known as a happy person, had loved the world without being loved in return, but that had never fazed his view of it. He'd smiled through a lot of his sorrow; of course, he'd cried a few too many times on the way, but he'd overall been truly happy in nature.

However, something was breaking the long train of joy. Harry was that something. Because of Harry, Louis Tomlinson had learnt how it truly felt to be loved with a person's whole heart, but from that, he'd realised that he could be hated by it, too.

There was a time in the past when good and evil were the same person with no distinction from one or the other, when both hatred and love looked at him though the same pair of blue eyes. There was a time when gentle touches and hard scratches came from the same pair of hands, and when the confessions of love were spoken when Louis' body was bruised and bleeding. Louis' Mother had given up her whole heart for him, just as Harry had, but unlike his, her heart was cold and infested with hatred.

It was this was slowly changing Louis from the innocent child who knew no harm to the one that understood it. Through a better love, he was realising cruel obsession was the only thing in his Mother's heart, and that, in the end, he was unloved by Mother.

'Harry's love is Louis' awakening. It's destroying his innocence.' Niall thought to himself, 'True love is corrupting him.'

"Hey, Goldilocks, don't stare." Shawn said, slapping his hand on Niall's arm so suddenly that the boy jumped in surprise. He turned to the desk behind him—or rather, to his right, as he leant not against the chair but the wall—and frowned with uncertainty. Shawn sat there, leaning over the table, his hand still on Niall's arm. Sitting to his left was one of his closer friends—a german girl named 'Clara Stahlbaum', whose father was in prison, and by the scary scowl that was constantly on her face, Niall was certain that she'd one day end up there, too. In a way, she was quite pretty, with forest green eyes and messy black hair and a sharp face, and she was prouder and calmer than the rest of Shawn's friends. She had a turned-up nose that she'd look down to stare at whoever addressed her, and she didn't smile often, but perhaps that she saved them for her closest friends only. She sat here now, even, looking down her nose to the phone hidden from sight as she texted one of her loved ones. Niall wondered who it was.

"Goldilocks, you're staring at Baum, now." Shawn said, shaking Niall, and it was only then that Niall realised how long he'd been watching Clara. It was also then that he realised how many times before that he'd also looked at her like this.

"Let me go." He said, shaking Shawn away. The boy let go of his arm and Louis felt a coldness from where his clammy hand had been. "What do you want?" he asked, "I can look where I like."

He made contact with Clara's green eyes as she glanced up from her phone to him, but she went back to it quickly after.

"Did your parents never teach you that it's rude to stare?" Shawn asked, sharply. He clicked his pen repeatedly, and it irritated Niall.

"I'm an orphan, now, remember?" He said, "My parents are dead, or were you too absorbed in Louis' life to remember that silly little detail?"

He turned around bitterly, but Shawn said a quick, "Woah, wait up a minute—" and spun him back around on the chair. He looked at Niall in an unexpected way. The cruelness that was usually on his face looked so apologetic. Niall had never seen this expression before. Not towards himself, at least. "Stop." he said, pushing Shawn's hands away from his shoulders. The teacher began to yell at someone then, and Shawn got distracted enough to let go, but he returned to Niall soon afterwards.

"What did you say about Louis? Who said that I was absorbed in his life?" He asked.

"Well, aren't you?" Niall said, "You're obsessed with him. I may look at him, but you stare. You always have."

"That's not true." Shawn denied, backing away from where he'd been leaning over the desk. Clara smiled, overhearing, and put her phone away. She turned to the blackboard but Niall could tell she was eavesdropping. "I've never stared at Louis. He's just a kid with a rough life."

"We're all kids with rough lives, that's what we're doing here." Niall said, waving around himself to the crumbling school, "This dumping ground is where kids with the rough lives go. That's not why you watch him."

Shawn backed away and looked down to the small crack between the desk and the wall. A frightened pout was on his face, a blush in his cheeks. "What are you trying to say?"

Niall glanced to Clara. She watched her friend out of the corner of her eye, smiling. She really did save them for her loved ones. Niall lowered his voice, "I know why you're being so kind." he said, and Shawn's head snapped up to him. His eyes were wide, panic on his face, but then he submitted to it and sighed.

"Well, have you seen him? No person in the world could ever meet Louis and not fall for him at least once. You'd have to be a fool to let such a thing pass. He's got everything that we've been missing. He's got the love, the laughter, and all of the happiness that we've all missed out on."

"You used to hate him. You used to hurt him, and you don't anymore." Niall scowled at Shawn. The misery that his actions had caused couldn't be excused, no matter how kind he acted now. Niall could let him flirt, take Louis out on dates, give him pretty clothes. He could do all of that, but he would not _ever_ let Shawn forget what he'd done. "You used to gang up on him and push his head down the toilet. You've ripped his clothes and made him stand shirtless in the middle of the basketball field for everyone to laugh at. You've thrown his things away and he had to live off rations for two weeks just so that he could buy them back. You've ruined him, Shawn. You ruined him and got away with it because of 'discipline issues'. That's just cruel, no matter how you look at it. You're a horrible person for doing those things to him."

The light shivered in Shawn's eyes, and Niall saw faint tears stand there. He glanced at Clara, and she was watching Shawn with concern.

"After everything that you've done, you think that you can be loved in return, just by suddenly acting kind? You don't deserve his heart, why do you chase it?"

"I realised." Shawn said, fiddling with his pen. "I realised that I've been a bastard to him. I always thought that it was him being the weak one to always pester and annoy me. I used to think that he was just asking for it, but then I realised that it wasn't. It'd always been me persuing him. _I_ got under _his_ skin, not the other way around. After that, I just took the time to stop and watch him, and he became something so amazing. He'd always been.. so amazing.."

Niall watched Shawn. He felt the weight of the boy's heart, the regret within it, the love that poured from every crack it had. There was love there now, and perhaps it had always been hidden somewhere, but Niall didn't find even the tiniest piece of trust. "You're playing with Louis' innocence to get his forgiveness. You know that he doesn't understand how bad you've treated him because his mother does worse. He doesn't understand bad actions as being bad. You're a horrible person, Shawn, for using that innocence to your advantage. Kindness won't forgive you from being that."

Shawn leant over the table and grabbed Niall's arm. He hurt. "It's not like that!" he shouted. Niall flinched back, scared of the loud voice. A few people turned to Shawn, the teacher whacked the board with a ruler, and he quietened down again.

Niall glared at him, rubbing his arm. "So what are you going to do? Play with him again and again until he trusts you? Stop messing with him. You know, when you weren't acting so unnaturally kind, Louis was terrified to come into school. He spent our free-time avoiding you, head buried in textbooks so that you wouldn't see him. On Mondays after school, he'd cry to Granny, show her the marks that you'd left on him. You made his life horrible, you know that, right? You'd always thought he was happy, that he always will be, but you damaged him. You ruined Louis, but even so, he smiled just because that's who he is. He's a happy person, he always had been. So yes, he is amazing, but you're a bastard for ruining him. And the broken pieces that you left can never be fixed, no matter how kind you act."

Shawn didn't reply to that. He had no answer to give. Niall watched him. "I'll give you one chance to prove me wrong. Apologize to him properly. Without using his innocence to your advantage."

*

The bell rang, and Shawn lingered outside the classroom for a long time with Niall and Clara, as they all waited for Louis to finish chattering away to the teacher about his love for space and ballet and Harry and small pebbles. He talked about many things, Shawn heard every word of the shrill and bubbly voice through the wall. He smiled softly, head leaning against the door, watching Louis through the glass. The teacher was packing her things, and Louis was jumping all over the place. His hair pointed in every direction, his clothes hung on his body, and his plasters gave him colour. He grinned and laughed and chattered away to his heart's content, and there was so much love there. So much love that the world cracked open.

"Woah.." Clara—who'd also stopped to stare at Louis—said. Her word lacked breath, was overcome with amazement and wonder, and Niall could tell once more how incredible this little kid in Mickey Mouse plasters was.

Louis finally left the room, the teacher—still inside—laughing with him, and he shut the door, turning around, and was surprised to see people waiting. He looked at Niall, and Niall glared at Shawn.

"Louis." Shawn said, grabbing Louis by the wrist, and then letting go when the boy winced from a bruise there. "Do you have a moment?"

Louis took a step back but hit the wall, "What do you want?" he asked, stepping away from Clara.

Shawn pushed Clara towards Niall, implying rather prominently that he wanted them gone. "Baum, go with him. I'll text you."

Clara grimaced at him, and then walked off, not caring whether Niall followed or not. The boy looked at Louis, "I'll be right around the corner. Listen to him."

Louis watched him walk away, heart beginning to pound, and then Shawn took his hand. It surprised Louis, he pulled it back, and put it behind his back.

Shawn looked down at his empty palm, and put it in his shorts' pocket. "I want to apologize to you properly. I don't know how to take back the things that I've done to you—hell, I could never take those things back, but if I could, then I'd do it in a second. If I could, then I'd go back in time and put myself where you've been. I'd let myself get humiliated and tormented so that you wouldn't have to, but I can't. I want your forgiveness, but I want you to understand how much of a horrid person I've been to you."

He looked at Louis, and the boy didn't seem to be either pleased nor angry. He just had an empty stare on his face. The teacher opened the door, smiled at them, and left, but still, Louis looked empty. He finally leant back on the wall and looked up at Shawn. "You have.. been mean." he said, "It's not nice to shoot paper at people and to steal people's food. I didn't really think about it before. Nice people don't do that. Nice people encourage you, and have rubber ducks called Gerald, and make you feel safe even when you're in danger. Nice people give you a home when you don't have anywhere else to go. Niall and Granny are nice. My ballet friends are nice. The supermarket checkout ladies are nice. You, however, are the opposite of everything nice."

Shawn put a hand out to Louis, but Louis flinched back. "No, don't touch me." he said. He had anger in his eyes—Shawn had never seen it before—pure panic and hatred and regret and every other bad feeling was there. "You're a bad person! Why are you trying to be nice to me?! What do you want?"

"I'm not a bad person! Stop saying that!" Shawn said, but he was so unsure of himself. The look in Louis' eyes was so tormented and pained from Shawn's actions that he didn't know if he were good or bad anymore. His little step-bother had always told him that he was the nicest person ever, but Shawn was feeling like more and more people where telling him the opposite. It was a hurtful thing to hear, it really was.

He reached for Louis again, his hope fading, but the boy in plasters stepped back.

"You're being nice to me now but you've been a bully all of this time. You're just like her, thinking this is love! You're like Mother! Mother doesn't really love me, either!"

And then they both stopped, eyes growing wider. Shawn replayed the words 'you're just like her' over and over in his head, while Louis realised what he'd just said. Mother didn't love him. Obsession was not love.

Niall heard the conversation, and for a long while, he didn't know who he should feel the most sorry for. Shawn was just a boy, yet he was becoming more and more doubtful about who he was, and right now, he'd been shut down to complete silence by being compared to Louis' obsessive, psychotic, and abusive parent. But Louis was also dead silent. The little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters had just come to realise what Niall had noticed. He'd understood that the world wasn't kind, that good and evil were separate things, and that he wasn't a happy person, but his innocence—now corrupted—had fooled him into thinking that he was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that you liked this chapter! This is the 'turning point' chapter where Louis finally makes the distinction between real love, such as Harry's, Niall's, Granny's etc. and abusive love such as his Mother's, and (past) Shawn's.
> 
> I'm really curious to know what you think of Shawn now? Do you trust him, forgive him, or hate him?
> 
> Written with my love, Lucy.


	13. Balançoire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Are you enjoying the story?
> 
> If you are then please help me share it with other people so that they can read it, too! And don't forget to vote and post comments on parts that interest you so I can get some feedback. (It's really, really important to me, so please don't forget to comment)
> 
> Enjoy!

***

Shlick. 

Clink.

Shlick.

Clink.

Mother crept up the stairs.

She did not walk, but shuffled, using two chef knives to pull her weight up each step to her son's bedroom. She speared the knives into every stair, creating dents and deep holes that Louis would have to go out of his way to fix the best that he could.

Mother had drank, you see, used a man and thrown him away a few hours before. He'd come and he'd gone like all of the rest, and Louis had remained out of the way, huddled on his bed, with his hands over his ears and eyes fixed on the door. After the man had gone, utterly unaware of how there had been a child in the room right above him, Mother had fallen asleep. After that, she had eaten a meal that Louis had made with a glass of wine. The glass of wine had smashed on the floor, and while Louis cleaned up the shards, she drank another, and another, and another..  
Her legs no longer supported her, and Louis had lost count of the number of glasses that he now had to clean. In any case, that was not his main concern, for Mother, unable to walk, was moving still. Years ago, she discovered other ways to move when her body became abused by alcohol like this. Along the floor, ever since Louis could remember, there had been dents and deep holes bored into the wood. The knives in the kitchen would go blunt and snap at the tips far often than they should, but no one ever came into the house often enough to notice. Mother would not pick up the pieces that would snap and skid along the floor, and her son—barefoot—would always stand on the chipped blades.

The soft humming of a song followed the shuffling and clinks as Mother grew nearer. She sang like she always had, soft and sweet, but now there was something of an echo in her throat that turned lullabies to eerie chants. Yet the song—it was a one that Louis knew well, one from a story that he'd heard as a child. He hummed it with her, by instinct, while locking his bedroom door and shifting his bed, with great difficulty, across the room to block the entrance.

_"I wish I were away in Ingo_   
_Far away across the briny sea_   
_Sailing over deepest waters_   
_Where love nor care never trouble me"_

He knew the song like he knew the back of his hand. He'd sang it many times before, when the nights had been too long and the stars were out. If he leant far enough out of the window, he could see bats fly over the neighbour's house opposite his room. To his left was the road where he would often see children play or teenagers wander around, looking for trouble. Louis wished he could be with them, and then he could go on adventures such as climbing up  the Big Ben clock tower in London, or break into a zoo, or even dress up as a judge and save a criminal from going to prison for ever and ever.

There were a lot of things that he wanted to do, and he couldn't wait to be rid of this house so that he could go and be something other than _this_.

Looking away from the window when he heard a clanging in the corridor, he continued to hum the song. He sang to calm his fear, but it didn't seem to work very well. Perhaps that he'd hear the music too much. It was almost always there when Mother lurked outside his door, when she awaited for him to leave the bathroom, when she sat at the dining table, gripping a steak knife so hard that it trembled. Yes, he had heard it many times before, and he knew, if he didn't escape this place, that it would be the last sound that he'd ever hear. 

Louis stepped to the far wall of his room, back pressed against it, watching the door, the key in the lock, and the bed that allowed no vile creature to enter. He heard breaths, deep ones, and a cracking heart, but they were not his own, at least, he didn't think they were. Mother had reached him, after a whole twenty minutes, for the stairs had been hard for her to climb. Louis felt her eyes through the wooden door, staring as if she could see him through it. Maybe her instincts as a mother allowed her to. There was a possibility that, as a mother, she knew everything about her son. She knew where he was, where he hid, and therefore, if he were to escape, she'd follow on sightlessly.

Louis—with his bright eyes fixed on the door and hair standing on the back of his neck— bent down, and lay on the floor. Beneath the bed where he looked, at the crack between the door and the floorboards, was an eye, and it stared back at him.

He shot up and scrambled back, hand over his heart, and climbed onto the nearest surface which happened to be the creaking wooden chair. He'd been told by Granny and Niall that monsters under beds were just a horrible tale to scare little children like him.  
If that were true, why had he seen that blue eye when he'd looked beneath the bed? 

Tales must come from somewhere; and that 'somewhere', he realised, was here.

Louis stepped down from the chair, and bent down to the floor. He was scared to look, but fear roused his interest. He looked beneath the door, and that eye—glassy blue with a mere dot of a pupil—continued to stare back. The eye was rid of sanity, yet full of desire. Greedy, yet starving. Mother had the eyes of a vulture, the kind to watch and wait for a sign of weakness, sucking the life out of their prey, purely by staring them down. They watched over Louis, always, never releasing their stare. 

They never released their stare. 

Those eyes—vulture eyes—always watched through the walls, watched through the floors—when Louis was upstairs and she was down, waiting for the moment when Louis would admit defeat. They _never_ left him, too obsessed to move on, and in the few times when they would turn away, Louis' paranoia made him believe, with everything, that they continued to stare.

He stood up and climbed onto the chair again, listening to mother wheeze and crack and clink the knives together from the other side of the door. The blue eye was on his mind, making him shiver and his heart sink with disgust. It made him feel sick, truly. There was something hideous about that eye, something within it that made Louis go quite insane as he sat and trembled and leant over that brittle chair. It was then, while clutching his chest and looking  at the shadowed boards beneath the bed, he made up his mind.

He would get rid of the vulture's eyes.

*

"Are you alright?" Maria asked, putting a hand on Louis' shoulder and starling him out of his thoughts. She'd noticed him to be drifting in and out of daydreams, and he'd lose himself whenever there was no wild distraction to fascinate him, or when the attention was not on him directly. Here he was again, even, sitting on the floor and stretching, but his motions were weak, and his mind was wandering in some other valley far away from the ballet studio where he should have been.

"I'm fine." Louis finally said,  looking up at her and smiling. He had such a lovely face, with the softness of a kitten and the beauty of a red rose. He was not handsome as a boy his age should be, but pretty almost. Boys his age had sharp jaws and harsh eyes and well-built frames. Louis, on the other hand, was alluringly different. There was a strange aura of femininity about him, something delicate, and out of all of the swans that would dance at the upcoming the Royal Ballet, Louis—as both Odette and Odile—would make the finest swan of them all.

Maria sat beside the boy, seeing right through the fake smile that he gave her and the eyes that wanted to burden no one with worry. "What's on your mind?", she asked him.

"Nothing, I'm fine." He replied.

"You seem troubled", she insisted.

"I'm not, I'm fine.", was his answer.

But there was definitely something horrible swimming around in his bright mind. That smile was not one of a normal boy. Those eyes were not ones that Maria had ever seen. They were Louis', certainly, blue and alert and joyful, but it was behind them where corruption lurked. Something horrible drifted in Louis' mind. Maria could see it consume him, but he was _trusting_ and _mothering_ whatever thought this was, unwilling to expose its atrocity.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang and the floor shook. Both Maria and Louis' heads snapped around to see Harry lying on his back in the middle of the small ballroom, groaning. Lilly-Ann stood beside him, still on her tiptoes, with an alarmed expression over her face. She bent down and put a hand out to Harry who continued to lie on his back with an arm over his face.

"Did you slip? Are you alright?" She asked, drawing her hand away when Harry didn't so much as look at it.

He remained on the floor when Robin, Angela, Louis, and Maria also crowded around to look down at him. Harry lay there, left arm over his face, one leg propped up, the other prosthetic one lying flat against the shiny floorboards. He breathed heavily, chest rising and sinking, and Louis bent down to touch it. Harry didn't move when Louis crouched beside him, even though everyone had expected him to.

He would always make time for the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters.

"Harry?" Louis poked Harry's arm, and when he did, the man tensed up and flinched, biting down a whimper of pain. Louis looked at the people around him, searching their faces to see concern there, along with the strange confusion about the fact that Harry barely ever tripped while dancing, perhaps once every three months, but recently, he'd fall more than he'd land a jump or a twirl or even a basic step.

"Is he alright?" Louis asked, scared to touch Harry now as he stayed crouched by his side.

Angela's expression hardened, and in her stern Russian accent, she said, "Of _course_ he is. Ballet dancers like Harry _never_ stop." She bent down and put a hand out to grab him but Harry's reaction was so unexpected that it halted her right then and there.

In fact, Harry stopped them all in their tracks.

"No!" He shouted from beneath the arm that guard his face. His voice was terrified, shaking, "I'm not." He said, "I'm not alright. I can't go on anymore."

There was silence. Two hearts in that room shattered.

*

'Dear Diary,

Harry had an accident today. I'm not sure what happened, but he fell and wouldn't get back up. It wasn't the falling that hurt him, despite what I first thought, but he'd been in pain for far longer than that. The paramedic nurses looked him over and asked him questions, and the whole time, he was crying. Not much later, it was confirmed that this must all have been going on for a while, that the first time it had happened, the doctors had demanded that Harry must quit ballet in order for it to not happen again. He went against their words, and I'm certain that that is why he's in so much pain, now.

Now that I think about it, he had been acting strangely over the past few months. He's always been proud and stubborn and full of himself and unintentionally rude.. (the list could go on) but at the same time, he was far worse now. Over the past few weeks, Harry had become so determined that with every comment concerning his dancing, he'd lash out and be aggressive. He was prouder than ever, acting as if he were the King of the world, but that was all just because he was the only one to be completely aware that his crown was slipping.

He's in hospital as I write. I believe that he's in the intensive care unit, which is scary, but they'll move him later on. I really don't know how long he'll stay there, but his crying was so loud and scared when the paramedics carried him away that I don't think he'll be out of that hospital anytime soon.

I have a lot of angry names that I want to call him for doing this to himself, but I'll forgive him because we're friends and friends stay together no matter what. Then again, Harry's been in pain for _months_. As great as he may be at many different things, he's foolish. He made the mistake of staying silent once, it cost him a leg; yet even the punishment of loosing it was not powerful enough to break his silence a second time.

All of that pain just to dance, it's a tragic way to go. He's dancing himself to death, but the worst part of it all is that he chose to endure that secret alone.

The paramedics told us that, because he'd stayed quiet about it for so long, it may be too late. They can just about save his life, but he shall not dance, and when I think about it, about everything that I've seen Harry do, to hang up his ballet shoes will be a far greater pain than death.'

Louis stopped writing and stared at the paper for a while, scenario after scenario running through his head until he had to sign his diary quickly and hide it beneath the pillow before he could imagine anything more disrupting.

He sat in the dark for a while, letting the dim lights outside cast their faint glow on the old poster of that was taped lopsided onto the wall. In Louis' hands were his ballet slippers. He found that, in his room, he was always subconsciously holding onto them. They were battered, now, not shiny and clean like they'd been when he first put them on, and the fine pink silk that covered the tips of each shoe was torn and beaten from hard work.

Louis hoped that Harry would return soon, that the paramedics were wrong and that he'd dance again. The show had been cancelled once because a ballerina had fallen, it could not happen again. Not after all of the work and love they'd all put into it together. Harry wouldn't allow it, Louis knew that. No matter how much pain he'd endured over the past months, he'd always returned to the ballet studio, and it was strange that no one but Louis seemed to realise how unstoppable he was as a person. Even in his weakest state, as long as Harry could breathe, he'd continue to dance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone!
> 
> I hope that you enjoyed this chapter! Please make sure to leave a comment and share the story if you did so other people can discover it! x
> 
>  
> 
> What do you think will happen next?  
> Do you have any theories about any aspect of the story?
> 
>  
> 
> If you have any questions just ask me here, and I'll get back to you. Xx
> 
> With love, Lucy. Xx


	14. Bone Cancer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reminder of previous chapters and relationships:  
> \- Harry got sent to hospital after falling while training  
> \- Louis has realised that abuse is different from love but he's still a little confused about it  
> \- Louis' Mother was creeping up the stairs with two knives in her hands and watching Louis beneath the bedroom door, to which Louis made the decision to 'get rid of her eyes'  
> \- Louis and Shawn had an argument and Louis said, "You're just like Mother"

"Mother," Louis said thoughtfully, as he sat at the kitchen table, twirling a spoon around an empty bowl. Mother ignored him, standing with her back to her son as she put sugar lump after sugar lump into her over-flowing teacup. Louis noticed the tea dribble down the side of the counter, and he stood, rushing over to Mother so that he could hold her hands and make her stop. When he did, she smiled at him.

And those blue _eyes_ —they were rid of love, of passion, of everything in which a mother should have. The only shards of feeling that remained within the blue were poignant and splintering thoughts of insanity, depression, fear, and obsession. Her eyes were that piercing blue of an ocean, just as Louis' were, but the depth of them was nothing beautiful, any longer.

And her _hands_ —they were so bony, not like the ones that had held Louis' body or stroked his head when he was a baby. They were indeed still chapped and well-worked, just as they had been back then, but booze and drugs and crawling across the floor was the cause of their poor state now.

Then there was her _body_ when she hugged him. She was a skeleton, and her son—deprived of a good meal—was rapidly joining her. Her lips, lined in bright pink lipstick, touched his forehead where a bruise faded. Louis wondered if she realised what she was doing. He wondered if she knew where she was, who she was, and who _he_ was?

He wondered if the beautiful lady that had raised him would ever return, and he looked up at Mother, and realised that that beautiful lady with the bright blue eyes was dead. She'd died long ago.

"What day is it?" Mother asked, letting go of Louis to lean against the counter.

"It's Tuesday, Mother." Louis replied.

"Do you not have school?"

"Yes, Mother. I will leave in an hour, Mother."

He paused. Her eyes were on him, waiting. She may have been lost in some dark and twisted corner of her mind, but she could tell that her son was troubled. Perhaps that it was the way that he stood, or his expression, or the fact that he kept glancing to the cutlery drawer. He was acting strangely, stranger than usual.

"Louis, my dear, what is the matter?" Mother inquired, watching her son linger by the doorway. He swayed on his feet, to and fro, gripping onto the chair and sparing endless glances to the locked cutlery drawer as if he could see right through it. Mother wondered what he wanted from within.

Finally, after a moment of reflexion, Louis looked at her and smiled. She did not notice the lack of joy in his eyes, nor did she see the corners of his mouth tremble from fighting the will to cry, "I wrote a poem for you. Will you listen?" he said.

She nodded. "Have you, really? You always loved writing, didn't you? Let me listen. I'm sure that there is no poet better than you, my dear." She sat on the chair and waited for him to start. He fidgeted, glanced at the locked drawer, and gulped. Staring one last time at the terrible and sharp corruption in her eyes, Louis moved a hand towards them, and closed the lids.

"There was once a little bluebird, in a bluebird's nest."

He walked to the drawer, and slipped the key in the lock, coughing when it clicked.

"There was once an angry cuckoo, who thought that she was best."

He opened the drawer, watching Mother. She didn't flinch, nor did she open her eyes.

"All the bugs and bees told mother blue to hide."

Louis looked down at the drawer. Spoons, forks, and knives stared back.

He ignored them.

He felt to the back the drawer, and found a needle and thread. Retrieving it, poking the thread through the hole, he continued to speak.

"They did not want the baby birds to be devoured alive."

He walked up to Mother, and said, "Your eyelashes are pretty, can I do your makeup?" She nodded at him. "I'll put bracelets on you, too. Don't peak, you can see them afterwards."

Louis bent down to her wrists, and using two of her own belts that had previously been hidden around his waist, he tied them to the chair. "Don't move, I'm going to do your eyelashes. Don't move a muscle, please."

He gave Mother a kiss on her cheek. If she were to try and move her wrists now, his whole plan would fail. So he continued his poem, voice cracking, fear in his heart, yet he did what he felt obliged to do.

Picking up the needle, he said, "One day, the cuckoo laid an egg, in that nest of blue. It was larger than the rest, and it was heavier, too."

Louis moved to her right eye.  
His love for her made his hand tremble.

He could barely speak, but he continued. He pushed the needle through mother' skin, just above her top lash line, and she was so numb from drugs that she did not feel a thing. "Mother blue raised the stranger egg, and did not notice flaws. She even raised it as her own, when the cuckoo was born."

Louis watched his Mother. To speak right now was, by far, the hardest thing that he'd ever done. He watched the thick thread go through her eyelid, top to bottom, right to left, and it hurt that she trusted him. She never tried to resist, never tried to move her hands that were strapped to the chair, and never doubted her son's love to her. She trusted him, and he did not.

Perhaps that he was the worst of them both, after all.

His voice trembled properly now, he couldn't hide it. He couldn't stop the tears streaming down his face and the pain in his heart from making him bend over and clutch it. He was doing something terrible, and to a person that he would risk his life for. But, despite of it all, he recited the poem, and he did not stop from what he was doing.

He snapped the thread while placing a forceful kiss on her cheek, and moved to her other eye.

'I could've loved you,' He thought to himself, 'I wanted to love you until the end of time. Perhaps that I still do. If I didn't, then why would I be looking a mess like I do, right now?'

He laughed a little, wiping his cheek on his shoulder. "You look beautiful, Mother." He commented, and then he began to cry truthfully. Large tears fell down his face, dripping onto her dress, onto his shirt, and onto the floor. He couldn't betray Mother like this, but he didn't want to stop. He just couldn't bare to see those blue eyes in so much pain again.

"The little—The little cuckoo did not like his friends and wanted each gone. He pushed them all from the nest—from the nest—until there was... but one."

It was then, when his voice cracked, that Mother opened her eyes.

Yet one of them was bleeding, sewn shut with thick black thread.

Louis scrambled away, and Mother paused. She tried to raise her hands to touch her eye, wondering why it would not open, why her son was looking like the mess that he was, and she found her hands to be strapped to the chair.

It was then that she screamed.

And Hell, she really  _screamed_.

She screamed so loudly, screeching and snarling and lashing out at the little boy in plasters that the pans handing on the wall trembled and the floorboards snapped when her feet slammed against them. Louis stood there with his back pressed to the wall, trembling like a beaten puppy, holding the evidence to his crime in his hand.

"I'm sorry, _please_ —" He cried, although Mother never listened. Her left eye was still open, the right was trying, and there was spit and drool dripping down her chin. She struggled in the chair, and Louis was certain that if she were to be let out, she'd truly kill him this time. There was no pity in her stare, no forgiveness, no love, nor passion, nor even obsession. There was just anger, insanity, and Louis was just an object to destroy. She would kill him, Mother would truly kill him.

She moaned and screamed and wailed in fury. Louis could no longer speak. He just sank down the wall, dropping the needle and thread, and stared into the void in shock.

'It's been done,' he thought, 'I tried and I failed, but I did it. I almost got rid of those horrible eyes.'

*

The car door slammed shut louder than usual, and the little kid in Mickey Mouse plasters gave _not_ a smile but a look of terror to Zayn when he greeted him. "Hi." He said, giving that strange look, and then turned away to the window.

He jumped when Zayn put a hand on his shoulder. "Louis? Kid, are you alright?"

Louis looked back, and he was clearly not alright.

His eyes were so wide, pupils so small that it truly terrified Zayn. He had a smile, now, that seemed to be aggressively hacked into his face—twisted and forced to an unimaginable extent. Louis did not look like a child right then, but a puppet, or an animatronic, or some other thing with a face this distort.

"What has she done, Louis?" Zayn asked, grabbing the boy's face and searching the answer in those blue eyes. If he wanted the truth, he should've looked into hers.

"She hasn't done anything." Louis smiled, "We read poems together."

Zayn shook his head in disbelief. He wanted answers, but he didn't know the questions to go along with them. "You can't go to school. Something is wrong with you, Louis, don't lie to me. I can't take you to school like this."

He pulled away from the drive, tires screeching over the road, and said, "We're going to the hospital."

*

Zayn watched Louis through the glass of the hospital room. Nurses pushed past him and the corridor was alive with patients and visitors. Louis sat in a private room, not on the bed that was there, but on a chair beside it. He held an open book in his hands about astronomy and his lips were moving. An empty glass of water lay on the bedside table with the remains of tablets in that had calmed him down considerably. He was his normal self, now. Possibly a little dazed, but beyond that, he seemed alright again.

"Do you know what happened?" The elderly nurse inquired as she stepped up to Zayn. She offered him a coffee and he took it, eyes on Louis.

"I couldn't tell you that. You'd have to ask him, but he won't tell what he doesn't want to share, trust me on that." He thought for a while, remembering all of the times that he'd suggested taking custody of Louis and sending that Mother of his to get help. He recalled Louis fear and panic attacks all too well, and they had only been caused by the suggestion to separate him from his Mother. Zayn knew it was probably wrong to stay silent, but he couldn't put Louis through that panic. "It must have just been a bad dream. He gets them a lot and they're so vivid that he think they're real sometimes." Zayn laughed stiffly and the nurse nodded.

"Alright." She said, not believing the lie but accepting the secrecy of the situation. "Still, he appears to be fine, now. Just make sure that you send him to a doctor. A child this young shouldn't have bad dreams like that; they become real far too quickly. I'll tell you, Mr. Malik, that boy grabbed onto me and muttered something about monsters earlier, I've never seen anything like it, he was terrified, poor sod; God knows what he was on about though." She began to walk off, "Make sure that you call the doctor!" she shouted, waggling her finger, and then she was gone.

Zayn turned back to Louis one last time, before turning away to sit on one of the waiting chairs.

*

"And this one looks like a bear, and this one looks like a lynx, and this looks like a crab—"

"It looks nothing like a crab." Harry said from the bed. "You can't just take five random stars and call it a crab. It looks nothing like it."

His voice was raspier than usual, tired perhaps, and certainly weaker. His eyes didn't fully open, either, and he didn't move anything but his head. When he'd look at Louis, however, he'd smile every time. Louis, upon looking at the Cancer constellation for a while, finally turned to Harry and then rested his head on the man's torso. He held the book on Harry's lap so that he could continue to read it. "Am I hurting you?" He asked, tipping the book on its side so that he could see it better.

"Not much." Harry replied, "It's not my body so much as my arm. Oh, they took my leg, did you see?"

Louis looked down the bed where the blankets only showed the shape of one foot. "Where?"

"No idea," Harry replied. "I have to pee in a weird cup thing as well. I haven't been out of here since I arrived. I doubt I'll be free to go any time soon."

Louis sat up again. "Which one? Arm, I mean." He asked, and Harry glanced down to his right side where Louis had been lying.

"You didn't touch it, don't make such a worried face. It's alright, Louis."

"Is it?" Louis asked, observing the way that Harry's life seemed to have faded from his face. "Is it really alright? Will you leave this hospital all in one piece? Will you dance again? When you're smiling under the shower of roses at the end of this Christmas' Ballet, and holding my hand when we bow, _then_ you can tell me that it's alright." He looked at Harry's hand. There was no movement in it at all, and it was turning a strange blue colour. "Until then, don't tell me it's alright. It's not alright, Harry."

Harry nodded for a moment, looking down at his arm. It hurt him so much that it didn't feel like a part of him anymore. It felt like an extra weight that never left and just drove him insane. He wanted it gone. He genuinely wanted every part of his arm after the shoulder to be removed. He'd beg for it to be taken away, he truly would.

"What about you?" He asked, looking back to Louis.

"Well, I'm not alright either, so that makes us even more best friends because we're the same, I guess." Louis said, "But I don't think that I ever have been alright. I want to get out of the house and live with you, or Niall, or Zayn, or _anyone_. But the other part of me doesn't want to leave Mother."

"Why not?" Harry asked, seeing every plaster on Louis' body and wondering how he could possibly hold onto the creator of those wounds. He found it strange that Louis' Mother had not sculpted him into another version of herself. He knew that Louis would never, in a million years, cause pain such as she had caused it. He wouldn't hurt a fly. It amazed Harry how Louis had remained sane all of these years of being barricaded up with her. Perhaps that was why he admired him so deeply.

"Why not?" Louis repeated after a while, "I just don't want her to be sad anymore.She's happy with me. If some strange people came to take her away then she'd cry and panic and they'd do horrible things to her and lock her up in prison. I don't want to leave her, I'm all she has, and if I let anyone take her away then I'll be a bad son and she won't love me anymore."

"You're doing it again, Louis. You know that she doesn't love you—her mind isn't in the right place to love anyone—but you keep convincing yourself that she does. That woman does not love you, Louis. Being shouted at isn't love, being hit isn't love, being used as an anger relief isn't love. If she hurts you, it is abuse. Abuse is not love, Louis. Even if she kisses you and holds you and tell you nice things, never believe that it is love.   
Abuse, no matter how discreet, is not love."

And then came a moment that made Harry raise his eyebrows in alarm. Louis began to cry, but it was not from the realisation that his mother was abusive, because he'd already known. He cried too much for that to be the reason, so Harry asked what the matter was, and Louis' reply had been,

"Your view of me is wrong, I'm just like her."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Please remember the message that Harry has just told Louis!
> 
> Abuse is not love. If you are in a relationship or in contact with anyone who verbally attacks you or physically hurts you, it is abuse and you need to find a way to cut them from your lives. If you are in love with that person, please free yourself from that feeling and take a step back to realise what they do to you.  
> People can say 'I love you' and still be abusive. They can still show physical and emotional attraction to you but still be abusive. If you cry over them or get hurt because of them, it is abuse. Don't let their love fool you into thinking that the situation is alright, and don't give them the chance to fix it.
> 
> Asides from that message, what do you think of the story? Do you have any questions?
> 
> Also, I have not had bone cancer, nor any other kind of cancer so I do not know the accurate details despite the fact of me knowing people who have had it, so if you are familiar with cancer, I apologise for my inaccuracy and possible ignorance of the subject. Asides from that, certain factors may have been altered for the purpose of this story.
> 
> My love, Lucy. XX


	15. Relevé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reminder of the situation:  
> \- Harry collapsed and was taken to hospital where he is currently in a hospital ward on his own.  
> \- In the last chapter, Louis sewed his mother's right eye, and she caught him doing so. Zayn saw that Louis was out of it when he picked him up for school so they went to the hospital. Louis ended up spending time with Harry.  
> \- At the end of the last chapter, it finally hit Louis what he had done, and he concluded that he has abused his mother. He starts to cry when he realised that he is 'just like her'.

Harry watched in alarm as large tears poured from those pretty blue eyes of Louis'. He wondered what part of the boy's heart had cracked, and why it had done so, and how deep that crack was. For sure, Louis had cried many tears—anyone in his situation would—and it hurt to watch, so Harry looked at his lap. He saw Louis' hand out of the corner of his eye, resting on the side of the bed where he gripped the sheets. His palm was scuffed up as if he'd fallen over, and the scratches were too big for even the biggest plasters in the box to cover them.

It was then that the door opened and Zayn barged in. He appeared shocked, which, for the record, was an expression that Harry had never seen on him. He was usually oblivious, or dazed, and most of the time he was both. Zayn walked up to Louis and lifted the child's face to peer at him as if it was just an illusion that Louis was in tears.   
"What happened? What did you do to him?" He asked Harry, and to Louis, he said, "Are you alright, boy?"

Harry stuttered for a few seconds, shrugging which sent a searing bolt of pain through his arm, "I—I don't know, he just started crying, I don't know—"

Zayn glanced from Harry to Louis, rubbing the boy's cheeks and pulling them and squishing them, all of which had no effect as Louis continued to sniff and whimper. "Don't cry, please. Please don't do that. You're fine." He then lifted his hand and pressed his fingers to his thumb. He began to pretend that his hand was a puppet, and made it say "Don't cry, little boy, Mr. Wiggles says you're fine."

Harry looked away, an irritated look on his face, wondering how such an incompetent person had been taking care of Louis all of this time. He didn't like Zayn, and couldn't believe how the man hadn't done something to get Louis out of his mother's care. Harry couldn't do so, he didn't know enough about Louis to understand what the outcome of separating him and his mother would be. To know was something vital, and as long as he was ignorant to it, he could do nothing besides give Louis a safe place to stay.

But Zayn knew Louis enough. He knew the outcome and still did not find a solution to the situation, despite Louis calling out to him for help. Louis always cried for help—to Zayn, to his teachers, to the ladies in the supermarket, to strangers.. He made it clear that he wanted help, knew that he needed it desperately, but adults were incapable fools, and Louis was told that 'because he was smiling, he was fine'.

That was what had made Louis believe that his mother still loved him in the first place.

It was the adults that corrupted his mind like that.

"I'll get you water and a lollipop. Would you like that?" Zayn asked, squishing Louis' flushed cheeks. "Stay here." He said, before rushing out of the room.

Harry watched the door close and click, and then he turned his face to Louis. "Is that the face you'll make when the curtain closes at the Ballet? That crying face?" He smiled and Louis looked at him. "You've had prettier moments."

Louis laughed a little and wiped his eyes with his fists. "Are you going to cry? Do you cry at your shows?"

Harry nodded, "I do. Sometimes it's joy, sometimes it's sadness. Sometimes both. I always wonder which it'll be."

Louis shuffled his chair up to Harry and put his head in the man's lap, looking up at him. Harry moved his left arm and stroked the boy's hair back. They smiled at each other, the softest smiles they'd ever shown; and the world forgot to turn.

They heard nothing but each other's breaths, saw nothing but the blue skies and green grass in each other's eyes, and Louis brought up his hand to hold Harry's as if the red strings around each other's little fingers were tugging them towards one another. They did nothing more, said nothing more, and their love—a growing tree from the very start—burst into flower.

After the while that Louis had spent stroking Harry's hand with his thumb, and Harry had spent watching him with that wonderful love, they finally spoke again. Harry asked him why exactly he had cried and said, ' _I'm just like her,'._

And the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters had opened his eyes and smiled, "No reason really. I just realised that she's real." He'd replied, "Mother's real, she'll hurt me again."

Harry watched a light in those blue eyes shiver, like a thought that spun around and around in Louis' head. There was no doubt about it that the reason for Louis' tears was the thought hidden in that trembling light, but he'd not conveyed it.  
 Harry wondered what a boy like Louis would hide. He had an honest heart, the kindest and most truthful, so what event could possibly have happened to make him keep it a secret?

"Come here." Harry said, and he tapped his own lips with his left hand. Louis stood up, making sure to not touch Harry's arm that was getting bluer by the minute. He moved to Harry's mouth and stopped before he reached him, for no other reason than to look at his lips and compare them to rose petals in his mind. Harry didn't hesitate, and leant in just that missing inch until the rose touched Louis' mouth. He brought his left hand to Louis' nape and pulled him forward.

Harry's tongue licked Louis' lips, then moved into his mouth and their mouths touched once more with a love that was bittersweet, and they really liked the taste.

They went on like that in the closure of the little hospital ward where no one could see nor hear them. Harry kissed Louis all over his face and on each of his plasters, and Louis turned into some sort of kitten that wanted every bit of attention and seemed to almost purr in response to it.  
Finally Harry pulled back to lean his head on Louis' shoulder and sigh. He then groaned and Louis stood up. They looked at his right arm. His fingers were purple, and there was now faint bruising appearing all the way up to his shoulder.

"That's not good." Louis said, frowning. "Shall I get a nurse?" He asked.

Harry shook his head and laughed faintly. "No. Don't let it worry you." He glanced at the clock and it read a-quarter-to-four. "You should go home."

"Why?" Louis asked a little too frantically for it to not raise suspicion. Harry gulped, glanced down at his arm, and said, "I'm going to another room soon. I'll be asleep for a while. I'll come and see you at the Ballet studio and I'll look a little different. Practice well, and don't forget to stretch before and after or you'll get muscle ache."

Zayn then returned with a handful of lollipops and a plastic cup of water. He was to stressed to even glance at Harry, and ushered Louis out of the room while dabbing his own forehead with a polkadot handkerchief.

Harry smiled at Louis through the glass and half-closed blinds until the boy was gone. And when he was, Harry's smile dropped.

On his sharp face where a loving look had been waiting just a few seconds before was now a contorted look of pain. His eyes were tightly closed and his eyebrows furrowed. He threw his head back and cried out in pain. His heartbeat on the monitor rose until it began to send an alarm through the hospital ward.

A nurse came rushing in with a large needle and a glass of water. Harry panted, squirming violently, shouting out and groaning, struggling against the nurse who put a mask over his nosed mouth. After a few minutes—long, long minutes— Harry let out his final cried and fell limp onto the bed, no longer feeling any pain. The nurse brushed his hair back from his face and calmed at him with a smile. He watched her, gaze heavy, skin glistening in sweat, and she said, "I've numbed it, Mr Styles. The pain will completely go soon enough. You're doing well, Sir, just hold on. Keep breathing, in and out. You're doing well."

Harry looked at his arm one last time when the nurse took a black marker from her pocket, and vowed to himself to never look again.

*

Zayn pulled up at Louis' house, a lot calmer than he had been in the hospital after going on a rant about everything and anything where the original subject had been Louis, but had quickly derived to his personal life and his vegetable patch that was not progressing as well as he would have hoped.

Louis looked at his house, eyes wide with fear, images of Mother lurking in his mind.   
In his memories, Mother crawled across the floor. Mother sat outside his door and stared ahead with a smile on her face. Mother lurked in the cupboard under the stairs where a 'tap, tap tap' was heard as she knocked her forehead repeatedly on the wall. Mother walked up and down the stairs at night, over and over until the planks were warn. Mother did adult things with men in the living room while Louis was forced to clean the floorboards right beside her. Mother smelt like drugs when she'd hug him afterwards, and Louis would smell like adult things when he'd finished cleaning up the sofa. Louis would shiver at night and sleep beneath his desk where the wind from the smashed window couldn't reach him. He would wish for a duvet or anything more than the old baby blanket he had. He would listen to Mother walk up and down the stairs, tap her head on the wall. He would sense her sitting outside his door and stare ahead with a smile on her face. And he would feel the floor shake when she crawled across it. All in his memories, and he had little room for happy ones.

"I'll come for you tomorrow." Zayn said, making Louis jump. "I promise. If anything goes wrong, call me."

"I don't have a phone." Louis said, without turning his face away from the closed curtains.

"Oh, well, I'm sure that you'll be fine. I'll be here tomorrow."

Louis paused, nodded, and got out of the car. "Goodbye." He said.

He shut the door when Zayn began to say something else, and walked up to the front door. He'd usually admire the daffodils and pansies that grew by the hedge, but he didn't this time. He just watched the house as if it'd engulf him again. There was no movement behind the curtains, no sound, and Louis waited for a long while before opening the door. He glanced one last time down the road where Niall's Granny's house was, and wished that he could go there instead. Her car was not there—the little green one that was too small for even Louis—and that didn't reassure him in the slightest. She wondered where she was, and then wondered if he could teleport himself there, and then he wondered if Harry was alright, and then he thought of Ballet, and he smiled.

His smile gave him the confidence to push open the door. The stench of dried blood and stuffiness wafted over him and he almost slammed the door shut. He walked in, stepping on the planks that he knew would not creak, and closed the door at the speed he knew would cause no sound.

To his right was where he immediately looked. In the kitchen. It didn't surprise him to see that the chair had tilted and Mother was no longer there, but he would have been as equally unsurprised to see her still there. The open fridge was the only source of light in the house, and when Louis' eyes turned to it, he noticed it to be empty. Milk was tipped over the floor, turned red from blood that was also smeared over the floor, showing evident marks of a struggle to get free from the chair. The cupboards were also open, food pushed out and tipped all over the counters, and all of the knives were missing from the cutlery cupboard which Louis had forgotten to lock again.

Louis' eyes followed the trail of blood droplets. They lead to the living room where they'd gathered by the window. Hand marks were on the plastered wall. The blood then exited the room and gathered at the foot of the stairs in front of Louis, and then lead up them. Louis followed them, stepping in the quietest places. He heard her now, whimpering in the bathroom like a lost puppy.

Louis went to his room and put down his bag. He was about to remove his shoes but went against the idea. He paced up and down his room for a while, bitting his nails; and sat on his bed to read a comic book about two boys going on adventures together; and wished that he could have raspberry rose hair like the hero of his comic did; and he remembered that he could never die his hair as Mother would go berserk. After thinking all of this, he realised that there was no use in hiding, and the thumping of his own heart hadn't decreased since he'd tried to forget about it. Mother was still going to kill him, and he couldn't do anything.

He couldn't do anything unless he tried, and Mother hadn't raised a quitter.

Louis left his room, approaching the whimpers behind the semi-closed bathroom door. He could see the whole bathroom in the mirror that hung above the sink, and so he looked through the crack in the door. Mother was sitting in the bath, fully dressed, probably in cold water, with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She'd smoked a lot, Louis wanted to throw up from the smell. He was, however, almost reassured to see both of her eyes open, even if the lid of her left one was swollen and heavily bruised. She looked as if she'd been given a black eyes, and it made her look funny. Louis didn't find her as scary as he usually did.

He pushed the door open and walked in.  
Cigarettes were everywhere—all over the floor, in the un-flushed toilet, in the sink, in the bath, over the counter; there seemed to be no place left in that tiny bathroom that had not been touched by a cigarette. Some were smoked, most were not, but they all smelt horrible. The towels had been yanked from the rack, as well, and were on the floor in a blood-stained and damp heap. Louis' bath toys were broken, his little soldiers all decapitated and floating lifelessly on the surface of the cold red bath water. All of Mother's bottles had been emptied and smashed, and the shards of glass covered the tiles that must have cracked from the pressure.

"Mother?" Louis asked, trying to catch his mother's attention as she payed none to him and continued to sit in the bath, staring ahead as if she'd died and frozen solid in there. "Are you asleep?"

Her eyes were open, but she did look asleep; so much, in fact, that Louis jumped when her head clicked towards him like clockwork. She smiled stiffly at him, her mouth twisting up but that was the only part of her face that moved.

"Mother, what happened to your eye?" Louis asked, looking under the bathroom counter for clean towels and being both surprised and glad that they were untouched. He turned back to mother and jumped yet again when he found her leaning out of the bath, hand extended towards him, smiling frightfully. Louis stood up and put the towel over his shoulder. "Did you hurt it on something?"

"You did this, brat." Mother snarled, smile still there but it was clear she no longer controlled her body. She would not attack Louis on her own accord, and even if she did, it would not be when even she'd hope. "You did thats to me! Bastard!"

She snarled and screamed at Louis, lashing out with insults but her body didn't move in the cold waters of the bath. Confusion passed over Louis' face—curious, fake confusion.

"No, Mother, you hurt it yourself. Do you not remember? You walked into the cupboard above the kitchen sink and bumped your eye. Do you not remember? I asked you 'does it hurt?' and you said 'no, it doesn't'. After that, I put ice on your eye, do you not remember? I put ice on your eye and you told me that I was a good boy and that you love me with all of your heart and you always did... You told me that.. you love me.. that I am special and that I work so hard for you.. and you.. love me.. please—love me.."

He swallowed and turned away from her. He watched himself in the mirror. His face was covered in little scars and plasters. His eyes were less blue than they'd been before, he was sure of that, and the happiness he'd had due to pure obliviousness was now gone. He turned from himself to watch Mother in the bath. The right side of her face had drooped, and the left was covered in chapped blood from her eye.

"I did not hurt you, Mother. I am not your enemy. I am not an abuser. I did not abuse you. I did not hurt you. I would never hurt you. I would never hurt anyone. It was not me."

"You are not my abuser." Mother repeated, like clockwork, "You are not my enemy. I love you, Louis. I love you, my son."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you so much for being patient with me, I really hope that you like this chapter! xx
> 
> What did you think of it? What do you think will happen? Also, is there any aspect of the story/writing that you like in particular?  
> Thank you so much! x
> 
> Written with my love, Lucy.


	16. Mummy

The sound of snipping scissors had always been one of Louis' favourite sounds. As a child, he'd spent many ours of pleasure cutting things up. He used to have quite an unhealthy habit of doing so; cutting up the loose pieces of wallpaper that hung on the walls, snipping the sleeves from Mother's dresses, cutting his own clothes as well.. He'd cut up everything he would find that could have been cut, and it was a habit that—although he knew what was right and wrong—he had never really lost.

And so that was how he'd rapidly become distracted from the art lesson taking place, and how he'd all-so-quickly become engrossed in cutting paper dolls in the shapes of a ballerinas in pink paper. The lesson was almost over, with only ten minutes left, and he hadn't heard a word of it nor payed a single ounce of attention to what was going on around him. He now had a large pile of paper dolls, and if he were to line them all side by side, he'd reach from one end of the room to the other.

Louis sat at a table of four, with Niall opposite him, Clara by Niall's side, and Shawn sat to Louis' right. He hadn't spoken to any of them, and they hadn't really spoken to him either because they knew that when Louis was busy doing something he enjoyed such as making paper dolls, then he was content, and it was best to leave him that way.

Louis, in fact, hadn't spoken to Shawn in days, but he didn't plan to, and he'd pushed his chair all the way to the furthest corner of the desk from Shawn to make it clear that they weren't friends. Louis saw Shawn as a bug and he hated bugs. He pulled the legs off flies and couldn't help but imagine himself twisting Shawn's legs off.

"Louis?" Niall asked, startling the boy so much that the scissors slipped and cut off the ballerina's arm. "Do you want to come to my house? I'll have you home by five."

Louis sighed, looking at his paper doll and shaking his head. "I can't, I have to go to Ballet because with all that's been happening we're behind on rehearsals. Also, Harry is coming home today!"

His voice got higher at the end of the sentence and a wide smile spread over his face. Sat by his side, Shawn lost his joy.

After his vanishing smile came the dread and guilt that Louis would never like him again, and that he'd taken advantage of the boy's physical weakness to bully him, and he regretted doing that. He had never regretted anything more, but at the end of the day, he wanted to see Louis smile like he did now.

And Harry was the only one who could give Louis such happiness.

So Shawn decided then, while Louis spoke about Harry and how excited he was to see him again, that he would give up his love, and he'd let his heart run away from him like it had been trying to do this whole time.

And his heart had never treated him fairly—too full of life to be enclosed in his chest. So he watched it erupt beside him, the love within it bursting into flower. His heart—his broken and beaten and joyful little hear—was escaping to find the place where home had always been for it.

In another man's chest.

In a man who would treasure it until the day its beating would stop.

"—and he might not be able to dance yet because he was in hospital just the other week but he's going to do the show! I know he is! And he's going to carry me and twirl me around and it will all be fine because he's better again. Maria told me that Harry sends his love to me and that his arm doesn't hurt anymore and he can't wait to see me."

Louis went on like this until the bell rang, and then he went on until he reached Zayn's car, and continued then to speak about Harry until he was outside the door of the Ballet studio. Even then, his thoughts never strayed far from him.

He pushed the door hastily open, tripped over his own shoelace, and fell into the studio with a loud crash. It hurt, but it wasn't anything new, and he didn't have time to register the pain because his eyes fell on the people by the bench. Maria, Angela, Lilly-Ann, and Robin stood, looking in surprise at the little boy in plasters who'd just tumbled into the room; and on the bench, with a tracksuit on, a jacket over his shoulders, and a rather strange look of neither joy nor displeasure on his face, was Harry.

"You're back!" Louis shouted, as if he hadn't been going on about Harry's return for the past hour. He scrambled to his feet, stumbling towards Harry with the biggest grin you could ever imagine such a small person to have. "Are you okay? Can you dance? Are you going to dance today, Har—"

He stopped speaking, and the wonderful smile vanished from his face in an instant. He looked at Harry— _stared_ at him—and everyone saw the lights in his bright eyes simmer away.

Harry's arm was not healed like Louis had expected, and in fact it was not there at all.

"You had it amputated..." Louis said, lost somewhere deep in his mind, "..had it.. amputated."

Harry nodded. "There was no way to keep it. At least it doesn't hurt anymore." 

The man stood up, and the jacket slipped from his shoulders to fall on the ground. He wore a grey shirt beneath; one sleeve was empty and tied in a knot just below the shoulder. Louis took it and tugged as if Harry's arm would magically grow back.

"But.. But—"

He didn't say anymore, and to everyone's alarm—the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters burst into tears.

Harry laughed slightly, almost comfortingly as if his amputation meant nothing of a loss to him. He stepped up to Louis, pulling him into a one-armed hug. Louis hugged him in return, sniffling, and Harry placed a kiss on the top of his head. "It's alright, Louis. Don't be upset. Don't cry, you'll make it rain."

"But you didn't tell me.. Why did you keep it to yourself? You always keep everything to yourself. Why do you keep everything a secret?"

Harry shushed Louis, smiling down at him softly. He pushed the boy, watching everyone's guilty faces and shifting eyes as if this were a scene too intimate for them to witness. They slowly began to leave, each turning to do something else as a distraction but harry could still feel ho they craved to watch, craved to listen, and they were listening, too. They were listening to Louis cry for Harry, and they ere all reminded of how Harry had cried just like this for Rosaline. It was the same tears of unknowing regret, tears of sadness for a loved one, and tears that the loved one could not cry on their own.

But Harry, unlike his beloved Rosaline, did not want to cry. Perhaps that she had not wanted to either, because she was dead, and the dead shed no sorrow. But no, he didn't want to cry, and in fact he'd not been this happy in a long time. A weight had been lifted from him, a pain that had kept him awake night after night, and he felt—while missing both arm and leg—that he was complete. He felt comfortable again.

After a moment, Louis pulled away to wipe his eyes. "You'll regret it, one day." He said, "You'll regret keeping secrets."

He had a strange tone of voice; one that Harry couldn't quite place. He knew too much about what he'd just said. Far too much.

Harry pretended to let the strange feeling he got from that tone of voice pass over him, but it still resonated deep within himself, and Louis' words played again and again in his mind. "Will I?" he asked, sitting back on the bench. He stoked Louis' cheek and the boy nuzzled his face into it. "Will I regret it?"

"Yeah. You will. Trust me." He looked at Harry for a while, in the place where his right arm used to be, and was no longer. "What about ballet? You can't carry me, now. What about everything we worked for? What about Rosaline?"

"If there is one thing I've learnt from you, my little Louis, it is that tributes are a far different thing from love. I used to believe love was success, gratitude, egoism, and many other things as such. But then you found your way into my life, and in your own strange way of seeing things, you changed my life. Love, to me, is not a tribute to the dead, but it is to treasure what comes next, to find happiness, and to live in spite of pain. Love is new beginnings."

Louis watched Harry's lips move, but as he drank in the words, his eyes trailed to the locket around Harry's neck. On the left was Rosaline looking proud and stern just as Harry had been once; on the right, was Louis, with a bright smile and an open heart, just as Harry was now. And it was then that Louis realised—he was Harry's new beginning, and for that same reason, he was Harry's Love .

"Love is either the greatest thing in the world, or the worst nightmare you could ever live. How you choose to view it is what gives you the outcome." Louis said, looking back at Harry's eyes. "Will you dance with me? You can still be my Prince, can't you?"

Harry bowed his head, a small hint of a smile raising the corners of his lips, "I've won award after award for my Ballet while missing a leg. Do you really think that a missing arm can stop me?"

Harry tugged Louis towards him by the rim of his shirt and pulled him down; their foreheads touched and Harry closed his eyes. "I will dance with you, no matter what it takes. Trust me."

And Louis did. He trusted Harry more than anyone in the world. He'd jump off a cliff if he knew Harry were there to catch him. 

He nodded, smiled; and the sun came back out.

"Now go. I'll be your coach today." Harry replied, shooing Louis to the changing room. Louis' face lit up and he beamed at Harry. "Ah, just before you leave, I have a present for you." Harry added. He leant to his bag, fiddled awkwardly with it in attempt to unzip it, and pulled out a long velvet box. He handed it to Louis.

Louis took it and opened the lid. Inside was a bright yellow ribbon. He took it out, and it surprised him to see that the ribbon appeared to have no end. He pulled it from the box, letting it curl around itself on the floor until it ended in a white stick. Louis held the stick in his hand, Harry took the box.

"It's a ribbon wand. Sunshine yellow. It's got your name embroidered in the end."

Louis shook it out, mesmerised by the waves and path that the ribbon traced in the air. He saw his name sewed in baby blue thread, and he believed that if he were to smile any wider then his face would crack apart.

"It's so—thank you." He said, and that was really all he could manage.

Harry laughed, "I knew you would like it. I was going to wait for your birthday, but that's the date of the show. You've got a few months to practice; give me your best. I have yet to see what you can really do."

Louis looked at Harry, the ribbon floating down between them. Their eyes locked and they both seemed to either fall into great thought or deep love. In any case, their expressions showed both.

"Now go." Harry said after snapping himself out of whatever trance Louis had him in, "Get changed and hurry up about it. We've lost enough time as it is and I refuse to perform with amateurs."

*

Louis lay on his bed, and it was damp from a leak in the mouldering ceiling but he had no other place to go. The varnish of the wooden floor was also stained and water dripped from above it to fall into a bowl. It made an irritating 'drip drip drip drip drip' noise, and Louis believed that the bad temper he was feeling at that moment was due because of it. And the smell. He could smell the mushrooms growing behind the pile of clothes he was forced to keep on the floor, and he could certainly smell the dark damp patch above his head. He wondered if he should call a roofer to fix the leak, or someone else to get rid of the dampness, but he had no money to pay the costs, nor did he have any kind of insurance, and he didn't want to worry mother by making her believe that he was unhealthy.

He was, though. The dampness was giving him a stuffy nose, irritated eyes, and he was beginning to experience trouble breathing. The school nurse had given him an asthma inhaler which he now believed was the only thing keeping him alive at that point, and she'd told him that if he needed anymore help then he should go and see her again.

Louis knew the school nurse well, and every time he went to her, she always told him to 'see her again should he need any help', but he never seemed to be getting any better, and no matter how many times he went, the bruises on his body didn't seem to reduce in number. No adult seemed capable of helping him, and they all believed they were doing so which was the root of the problem in the first place.

A drop of dirty damp rain water fell onto Louis' forehead and he squealed, turning over and rubbing his sleeve frantically over his skin as if the water had stained a horrid disease into his body. He hated this house. He hated this room. He hated the stranger of a man that Mother was doing adult things with downstairs. He hated everyone and everything.

And if he could, he would quite happily murder everyone. Or perhaps tie them by the hands and feet and watch them starve to death. Or maybe he could put them in a room together and see who'd last the longest.

The little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters began to hum to himself, breathing in the mould, and wishing that everyone but his closest friends would just all die.

 


	17. Echappé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: This book is horror as well as romance. Trigger warnings applies to this chapter.

Upon realising, a few months back, that the world was not as nice as he'd ever imagined, Louis had slowly become a part of its cruelty. He was ever so slowly changing from a boy who saw everything and everyone with those same loving eyes, to a young man who had his closest friends behind him, and everyone else was an enemy. Of course, you couldn't tell that his views had changed; even Harry or Niall couldn't, for Louis was a liar.

And he lied as easily as he lived.

*

"This is not my room, Mother." Louis said for the seventh time, standing at his bedroom door where the smell of mould leaked from to waft over him. He coughed, his lungs clearly struggling, and looked back up at Mother. She held a wine glass in one hand along with a lit cigarette. The other stroked Louis' cheek. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. He was lead away from the bedroom to the landing, almost as if Mother understood that the mould was causing his health degrade.

"Wait here, my Darling." Mother said, and walked downstairs to the living room.

Louis didn't know why she'd left, nor if she'd return anytime soon, and he didn't really care either way. She'd probably forget he was waiting as she usually did. He put his hands in his shorts—just because he didn't have any pockets—in attempt to warm his hands. Winter was approaching fast, and the leaves had already fallen from the trees. People were wearing their warm coats and long trousers, now, and Louis wasn't. He was still in his shorts and tee-shirt, but it was alright..

In any case, Louis had done a lot of training for the Ballet in that time—so much, in fact, that his feet were swollen and covered in both bandages and plasters. Harry had bathed them in warm rose water and praised Louis for his hard work, but it didn't stop the pain, and Louis could barely walk, let alone run or skip or pirouette around as everyone expected him to. 

Harry was beginning to dance again, and he had a prosthetic arm just as he had a prosthetic leg. He knew how to work both as if they were a part of his own body, but he never lifted Louis up anymore, but instead would watch the yellow ribbon flutter around. 

Louis smiled at the thought of Harry, and then shook his head to realise that Mother still hadn't returned, and she was sniggering to herself downstairs. Louis decided to linger there a little longer, just because Mother would worry if he weren't there, should she return, and then she'd panic and beat him and Louis couldn't run this time; so he stayed put.

If he looked to his left, he could see into the bathroom. The small bath tucked into the wall was still grimy and had stained rings around it. A big brown cockroach crawled out from a cracked tiles  walls to fall into the bath where it scuttled down the plughole. A group of mushrooms sprouted from the corner of the wall behind the toilet, brown and looking awfully poisonous. Louis almost wanted to point them out to Mother in the hope that she'd eat them but he refrained himself from doing so. A spider hung from the ceiling, big and black and furry, and it was wrapping a smaller spider in silk with the intention of devouring it. What if Louis did that to Mother? He could tempt her to the bedroom just as the spider had tempted the other, then he could roll her up in a sheet until she'd suffocate to death. Perhaps he could eat her afterwards, but he didn't really like the idea of eating another human, especially one this pallid and skinny.

"Mother?" He called down the stairs, "It's Louis. Where are you, Mother?"

Her sniggering stopped and she poked her head around the living room door. It was early morning, and she was sober for now, even if her eye sockets were hollow and her pupils retracted to tiny dots. "Who is Louis?" she asked.

"Your son." Louis replied, "I am Louis, your son. My name is Louis Tomlinson, seventeen years old, and your name is—"

"I know who I am, stupid child, and I know who you are. Of course I know who you are, Louis." She snarled at him and threw her wine glass up the stairs. It caught Louis on the arm and shattered at the contact with his skin. He yelped—more surprised than hurt in that moment— and grabbed his arm, stumbling back a little, shoes crunching over shards of glass and a pool of wine. He was bleeding. A lot. And he was also quick to realise what had happened, and the realisation brought a very large amount of pain. He couldn't see any glass in the gaping wound just below his left shoulder, but the large gash that had been sliced through his skin would definitely leave a scar. He whimpered and pressed his hand to it, blood trailing through his fingers. He was afraid to stain his clothes. His other pair of shorts and other shirt were stained in urine because Mother had locked herself in the bathroom all day and Louis hadn't had anywhere to go. His other shirt was also covered in cigarette ash and nail polish because he'd accidentally upset Mother, and Mother had a bad temper.

"Louis? My Love? What happened to you?" She asked suddenly, making Louis jump as she stood right beside him at the top the stairs. Louis instinctively backed away from them to press his back against the wall outside the bathroom. His breath was wheezy, and he needed his inhaler but it was in his room with the mould.

"Nothing, Mother." He smiled, "We are safe. We are happy."

"Did you break my wine glass?" She asked harshly, pointing to the floorboards. She dropped her cigarette and Louis leant his foot out to stamp the tip before it'd catch fire. Mother was approaching him, heels clicking on the uneven floor. She had nothing in her hands which reassured him. She didn't usually do too much damage by herself; only leaving a few bruises and sometimes a cut or two.

"Wine glass? But the floor is bare, Mother." Louis said, letting a curious look hide the fear and pain that was permanently engraved into his face when he was around her. "There is nothing on the floor."

"Are you trying to make me go mad, child? Do you not see the glass and wine? It's all over the floor." She snarled at him, and he looked back curiously.

"I don't see anything, Mother. Maybe it's just your imagination or a trick of the light. The floor is spotless and completely bare. I cleaned it before you woke up."

Mother turned to him. She had a distort look of both someone who believed and didn't believe what was being said to them. "If you see nothing, prove it to me." She said. "Lick the floor."

Louis forgot every lie he'd ever told for a second and his sinister eyes changed to a fear he'd never experienced before. mother never asked for proof, never doubted Louis' words; and he no longer recognised her. She was dominating him.

"Mother.. Mother, there's—there's nothing there." He laughed stiffly. "The floor. It's bare."

Just then, Mother grabbed Louis by the neck and lifted him up. She was tall and thin, perhaps, looking as fragile as a a sheet of paper, but Louis was unnaturally light, and his feet no longer touched the floor when she raised him.

" _Prove it, brat_." She snarled. She threw Louis on the ground and thankfully for him he fell neither over the banister nor onto the glass. "Lick the floor."

The little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters whimpered and stood up. He limped towards the puddle of wine. A lightbulb swung from the ceiling at the landing, and as Louis approached the wine, he saw every single tiny piece of glass glint back at him.

"Mother.. It's me. It's Louis.." He turned to her, standing in the pull of wine, tears in his eyes. "Please, Mother."

She looked back with no recognition and with eyes that showed what terrible things she'd do to Louis next if he didn't do as she demanded.

With one last plea, he turned around and got down on his hands and knees. Plasters prevented them from getting hurt, but when he lifted his hand just the slightest to see the result, glass had slashed the the Mickey Mouse plaster and torn it open in many tiny places.

Just then, a kick came down on his back and his spine cracked in a hundred different places. "Lick it!" Mother screamed at him. Louis lifted his body from the floor. His arms, chest, legs and chin were bleeding, and the blood on his cheeks was clear water from his eyes, and his lungs were bleeding poisoned air, and he was bleeding his heart out until he wished once more that it could stop its beating.

He put his tongue out, and scraped it ages the floorboard.

And he felt that sensitive piece of flesh tear apart with every tiny movement as the glass shifted beneath it. Some tiny shards bored their way into his tongue, and when he lifted it, he could feel the ridges and lumps where they were buried.

"Again!" Mother's shoe came down to slam his head back onto the floor. He yelped, and his nose cracked, and the burgundy wine began to mix with crimson blood. Louis had a larger shard of glass wedged into his right cheek, between the cheekbone and his nose, and he could already feel his tongue swelling up.

He licked the floor again, glass cutting and wine poisoning and floorboards splintering.

She kicked his spine again, and it no longer cracked but merely shifted beneath her shoe. He could still feel it, still move his legs, but glass was wedged in every part of him. He submitted to her as he'd done so many times before, only this time, she was sober, and Louis took the risk of trying to lie to a sober woman.

Just then, the front door rattled. Louis stopped licking the floor and lay his head down. He was facing the opposite way, but he couldn't bare to move.  
He then heard the door bang open, and his heard began beating with hope that Zayn or Niall's Granny or someone had come.

It was a man's voice that spoke.

And there was no hope left for the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters

"My little slut. After all of these years, I've finally found you." it said, and beside Louis, a young Mother's blood ran cold.

Heavy footsteps came up the stairs and resonated through the floorboards. They stopped half way and the man stifled a gruff laugh. Louis felt his gaze on him and wondered what he saw.

And he saw his slut's baby boy, the one she'd tried to keep a secret, all grown up. He saw a tiny boy, frail and looking no older than fifteen. He saw a boy with plasters all over him, shards of broken glass lodged in his skin, blood in his hair, wine soaking his clothes. He didn't see Louis' face, and assumed the child as dead.

He turned away from the body to look at his precious little slut. She was ghastly, now; not the beautiful girl he'd known. The only recognisable thing about her were those eyes. Those blue eyes.

"Why do you look so afraid, my beauty?" He asked, grabbing her by the neck. He shoved her against the wall, his hand growing so tightly around her neck that she couldn't breathe anymore. He looked ten times the man he was back then, twice as large but it was all bulging muscle. He had a knife in his pocket, and the mother reached for it but he was quicker in turning his hips away.

She opened her mouth but couldn't speak a word, only gape and feel the blood rush to her eyes and brain which made her dizzy. And then a hand was under her dress, feeling up the slit in the material and moving upwards.

All she saw was her baby boy on the floor, she heard a baby's wail; her baby's wail, but Louis was silent as she could see that. He was bleeding all over and nothing was moving.

"Y—killed—k—him.."

"I killed him?" The man said, smirking at her. His fingers were inside her, or somewhere close, but she could barely stay conscious. She could only see a blurry image, now, and her son.. Her son..

"L—ouis.."

And then, the boy's head turned. He said nothing, and the man had not seen his movement, but both he and his mother felt each other's pain. They felt each other's love. The love that had been stolen from them years ago.

"Run—" The Mother said, "Louis—run!.."

The man shover her against the wall, and her body shifted up and down against it when he pushed into her. She could barely stay awake, could barely hear the man's voice saying "Stupid bitch, he's dead."

She reached out to her son, to Louis Tomlinson, seventeen years old and the best person in the whole world, and said his name one final time.

Louis closed his eyes, listening to grunts and moans, and reached a hand out. He grabbed the stair, and used every moan he heard as a signal to drag himself towards it. His spine was so painful, his nose broken, but he managed to stand, and he managed to limp down the stairs. Half way down, however, he made the horrible mistake of looking to the bathroom and seeing the man pressed against the landing wall. He made that horrible mistake of seeing Mother wedged there, and she was still alive, for a single tear slipped down her cheek when she looked at him.

"...Mummy."

With one last look towards the fallen woman, the boy in Mickey Mouse plasters walked downstairs and left the house that had imprisoned him.

And it was only hours later that he was discovered by a passerby, lying at the top of a very steep driveway where a famous Ballet dancer lived. In his hand was a ribbon. A yellow ribbon with his name.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! What did you think of this chapter?
> 
> I hope that you liked it, even though it was rather horrible. Again, this story is both romance and horror, so it is disturbing.
> 
> I hope that you'll look forward to the next chapter, and thank you to everyone who reads, it means so much to me.
> 
> With my love, Lucy.


	18. Effacé

Voices.

There were voices all around Louis, but he couldn't open his eyes to see who they were. He couldn't move his legs, or his arms, or his mouth, or anything. He'd wondered the first time he'd awoken what had happened to him, and since then he'd overheard someone saying that he was in a coma. That person hadn't been talking to him, but to Harry. No one ever spoke to him, and he kept having to remind himself that he was not dead, just asleep. He even wondered sometimes if this were even real; if the voices he heard weren't just memories escaping his body that-at that very moment-could be decaying in a grave somewhere. He was certainly lying down, but the room seemed to be warmer than he'd imagine a coffin to be, and it wasn't stuffy. No, he was fairly sure that he was alive.

He could still feel his body, for sure, and that was his reminder. It was a vague indicator to how much time had passed, for the cuts of glass in his body seemed to hurt less and less, and he could feel people touching him almost constantly. Nurses changed his clothes and washed him, and visitors would come to hold his hand. Niall came often with Granny, and every single time he'd shout in attempt to wake Louis up, or squeeze his hand so much that it would hurt. Zayn dropped by from time to time, but his visits were less and less frequent. That, or Louis fell asleep every time he was here, which was also a possibility.

He wasn't awake very often anymore, he didn't think; but dreams and reality were the same thing now. The only way he differentiated the two was that when he slept, there was no pain, and when he was awake, he could barely breathe.

Right now, he was struggling. There was a mask over his nose and mouth but the air seemed to thin with every breath. The sheets over his body were lightweight, but to him they felt so heavy that he was being crushed beneath them. He felt as if his whole stomach had been squeezed and emptied like a packet of juice, and no matter how much he tried to move in attempt to breathe; even when it was just to puff out his lungs for air, he couldn't move.

"Louis, my love."

Harry was sitting beside him. Louis heard the chair move and then Harry's hand came to his forehead. He didn't need to hear that voice to know it was him, just this touch was enough. Harry was the only one in the world to handle Louis so delicately, and he was right in doing so, for Louis was not in a good state of health by far. His heart was beating far too slowly, and his lungs were collapsing with every passing day, and he'd been here for three weeks but still hadn't opened his eyes.

"Don't wake up." Harry whispered in Louis' ear.

He'd say that every time he'd visit, and Louis didn't understand why. Surely, he should wake up because otherwise Harry wouldn't have anyone to dance with. He should wake up because otherwise Niall would sit alone in class. He should wake up because otherwise Mother would... Well, he wasn't sure about Mother. He hadn't heard anyone speak about her since he'd seen her last. He was beginning to wonder if she'd ever existed in the first place.

He hoped that she was alright; he hoped with his whole heart that she was.

When he'd wake up, he was going to run back home and surprise her. Maybe Zayn could take him to get a little present for her and a card to say sorry that he'd gone. Louis wanted to be sure she was alright, that she was safe. She surely was. No matter how beaten people could become, they were always alright. That was what everyone told him, anyway, that he was 'alright', and so that was what he believed Mother was.

"Can you hear me?" Harry said, "I know that you can."

Louis wasn't sure if he could, or if it were just his brain speaking in Harry's voice, but he had no choice to listen anyway unless he fell asleep, and he never slept when Harry was here.

"It's November today. Friday the first of November, 1994. It's raining quite a bit, but it always does nowadays. It's rather strange, you know; you seem to be the one controlling the weather, when you're not smiling, or in a coma as you are now, the sky becomes dull. I wish that it would rain forever."

Louis didn't know what to make of what Harry had just said-seeing as it was either suggesting he should be sad forever or in a coma forever; two things which he himself didn't want, and didn't understand why Harry of all people should wish that seeing as they were supposed to be friends.

"I came here in my car, and it isn't very busy. _Something about the way you look tonight_ by Elton John was playing on the radio. I saw a puppy in the park.. What else? Oh yes, I brought you some flowers. I'd let you smell them but I can't remove your mask. They're pink lilies."

Louis heard him inhale.

"They smell as sweet as you. I just really hope you'll never see them.."

Louis heard him stifle what seemed to be a cry hidden behind a cough, and then his lips were on Louis' forehead where they lingered for a long while.

"It's so lonely without you. People still talk and live their own little lives; I see people walk past your house a lot, with is strange because your village is so small. It's still as pretty as ever; I drive down your street so much nowadays in the hope of maybe seeing you there.. I hope it's all a bad dream sometimes and that maybe this never happened. Do you do that? Probably not.. Anyway, people still live just as they did before, but everything is just grey and dull without you; to me, at least. Before you smiled at me that very first time, I felt as if I were just feeding from a black mourning flower like the ones Rosaline holds in her coffin; after you came prancing along into my life, I've been feeding from you, on flowers that are blooming and the brightest yellow you could ever imagine. I stopped living for a dead woman and started to live for myself, for you. And if those yellow flowers whither up, then I'll starve. Louis, I can't live without you. Please don't wake up. _Please_. Never wake up."

Harry was begging Louis so strongly, so painfully, yet his voice wasn't enough and he knew it. He wanted to make sure Louis would never wake up but begging him to sleep forever was all he could do. It was infuriating. He kissed Louis' head again, harshly, and with such a full heart that he believed it would burst.

Just then, a child who ran down the hall started to shout. Harry looked at her run past. She couldn't have been older than four, and she had a handful of lollipops in her hand which she showed to her mother up ahead in delight. She screeched and Harry smiled at her a little. He'd always liked children; he and Rosaline had planned to have two, when she'd lived. He could vividly remember taking about it with her, and he remembered her smile when she'd shown off baby outfits in the shopping centre. She'd have made a wonderful mother-strict and harsh at times-but still... wonderful.

Harry wasn't sure what should become of Louis if he ever had the chance to be a father. It was something hard to imagine; maybe because he looked so young, or maybe because he had a childish way of viewing things. Harry struggled to imagine Louis with a baby, but could see him perfectly well with a puppy or a kitten, or an axolotl. Louis liked axolotls a lot, and had found a passion for them when Harry had taken him to the pet shop one Monday when his Mother had injured him a little too much for him to dance comfortably. Louis wanted to have a whole tank of axolotls when he was old enough to move in with Harry. He was going to name them 'Emily', 'Oscar', 'Pip', and 'Keats'. He also said that he wanted a frog, but he was scared of them and Harry didn't like them much either. In any case, Harry would have bought him one. He'd have bought him a whole pond of frogs if it would have made Louis happy.

The little girl screamed again out of joy, dragging Harry's eyes back to her. She toddled along, stumbling and running into people who merely smiled and slowed down. She giggled, oblivious, and Harry saw an alikeness to Louis. And then, when her mother scooped her up and gave her a kiss, the little girl shouted,

"Mummy!"

And when she did, the bedsheets Louis was under rustled. Harry looked down at them, his heart sinking so deeply in his chest that he was sure his stomach was swallowing it. The bedsheets rustled again, and Louis' hand that was resting on them shifted.

_No. Please, don't wake up._

His fingers twitched and he let out a heavy sigh. His foot moved beneath the sheets, and then so did the other one, and then his whole leg slid a little to the left, and so did the other. His eyes shifted beneath the lids, searching to open, and his neck cracked when his head moved a little.

_Please!_

And for the first time in weeks, Louis' eyes opened. They weren't baby blue anymore, but the deepest colour of emerald that Harry could imagine, and the pupils were dilated so much that they almost swallowed any colour around them. Harry's heart was hammering in his chest, his head shaking when Louis turned his face to look at him. He wanted to scream at the boy and tell him to go back to sleep; he wanted to force him back into a coma or do anything to turn back time. But he couldn't. No one had ever done anything for Louis, and Harry couldn't either. They had just all watched the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters stumble along and slowly lose himself, piece by piece. He could have been saved, he'd begged and asked for it so many times; but adults were useless, and he'd been ignored his whole life.

Louis looked in Harry's direction and lifted a hand. Harry saw the boy's vision quickly come back as his eyes grew accustomed to the light again and faded to that baby blue. He had his Mother's eyes, but his were hopeful and full of passion and love; hers had been dull when Harry had seen them for the first and last time.

Louis smiled, blinked like a newborn baby, and held onto a lock of Harry's hair.  
"I _am_ alive." He whispered, "I knew that I was."

Harry opened his mouth and closed it again, swallowing down the horrid feeling lodged in his throat.

"I'm alive and.. you are too... and we're.. going to dance the Ballet together... and.. bow and cry... We're going to make it."

Harry didn't answer.

"We're... going to live together and dance and be.. h-happy. I'm going to be an astronaut and.. fly to space.. and we're going to be happy forever.. and dance... forever... We're going to make it.. together.."

Louis smiled with so much love. He smiled with so much hope and joy for not just himself but for everyone he'd ever met. He had so many hearts within his own, so many memories that he treasured and so many dreams he was willing to chase. He had so much left to do, and had so many more people to make laugh. He had everything and nothing, just like passing butterfly to make every flower bloom. He wanted to go to space and buy axolotls and eat ice cream and just experience life for the first time ever. It was a whole world of exciting times that awaited him, and he couldn't wait to chase them all. That was all he'd ever wanted; just to live, to love, and to be loved in return.

Outside the hospital, the sky had turned from a dull grey to a deep orange sunset. Pink clouds passed silently and slowly through the sky, and the larks in the bare trees were singing. The water on the small boating lake rippled, and the grass far away on the moors swayed as mist engulfed them. People in the street continued to live their lives without realising that the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters was living his last minute.

In that moment, that peaceful moment where the world had never seemed more beautiful, the light in Louis' eyes drained away as he watched Harry. The smile of hope that he'd had relaxed and ghosted on his face, and the heart that had beaten for so many stopped.

Harry realised that the nurses were right; once Louis would awaken, he'd only have seconds left. And now; he had none.

Harry reached out and closed Louis' lids, drinking in the fading blue one final time as if he could treasure a part of Louis' soul by doing so. He moved a hand to the boy's chest and was sure that it was beating but it turned out to be just his own blood rushing through him. He said nothing, shed no tears, but stood up with a blank expression. He removed every tube and wire wrapped around Louis' body, as well as the mask from his face. Finally, he bent down and kissed Louis' lips.

Their warmth was gone.

And they never kissed back.

"Not again-" Harry said quietly into the crook of Louis' neck. "-please, God, I beg you... not again."

*

The funeral was held not long afterwards.

Only a few people were gathered by the grave, and for all of the happiness Louis gave when he'd lived, there should have been more. The little boy in Mick-the little boy in the Grave could have filled every single seat that had been placed if only people cared.

Harry couldn't bare to turn around and see no one, he couldn't bare to look at the grave either and see that Louis had been buried with his Mother. He'd been trapped with her in life, and now he was trapped with her eternally. Their names on the headstone were so close together, with hearts engraved around them as if Louis hadn't been abused and starved to death.  
Harry couldn't look at the few people there, either. Some were good, he'd shaken Niall's hand and Niall's Grandmother's, he'd nodded briefly at Shawn, but the rest were people he didn't want to even see again. They had all watched a child degrade over the years; they'd watched Louis become thinner and thinner; heard him beg for help and call out to them, yet they had chosen not to listen. He could have been saved long ago, but no one cared then, and no one cared still.

It made Harry so angry, so incredibly furious even that he refused to stay at the funeral. He'd lay a bouquet of lilies on the grave, listened to a few words from Zayn who acted as if Louis' death was something ' _impossible for a boy as healthy and lively as him_ ', and then he'd left.

It was only later on that evening, when he was sitting on his bed, holding a red and black Mickey Mouse plaster that the acceptance of Louis' death came to him.

And it came as a storm that had built up within himself, and once unleashed, was almost impossible to tame. He realised the boy was really just a boy; that Louis belived he was going to live; that he was a child who's been abused for years yet life excited him in ways Harry had never even imagined to be possible. They little boy in the grave had only had one wish-to be happy.

Harry vowed to himself then, just as he'd vowed to himself the first time, that he'd keep Louis' memory alive. As the walls cabed in and his heart did too, he clutched onto the plaster and prayed his final promise.

He would dance for Love, and he'd love until the curtain call.

*

**Hi! What did you think about that chapter/ the characters/ anything else?**

**I hope that you like this story still and thank you so much for reading it. Please tell me what you think xx**

_Written with my love, Lucy._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the last chapter! There is more, don't worry. xx


	19. Finale

**Hello! This is the final chapter, I hope that you'll like it. Please leave your thoughts while you read, thank you.  
\- Lucy. xx**

*

The Ballet Studio was full of tension, mainly between Harry and the rest of the crew. The music—for the first time in ages—had not been turned on, and the airman buzzed, and everyone just looked towards each other, back to Harry, and down at their feet.

It was almost Christmas. In five weeks was the show. Louis had been gone for almost a month and not once had Harry visited the graveyard. Maybe he should have, for the only bouquet there was from Niall, and it was withering such as the body within the grave.

Harry didn't dare to venture into a place that brought out death in a boy who'd had so much life. He didn't want to see the hearts around the two names on the headstone, didn't want to hear the silence when he was standing right beside a boy who could chatter on for hours on end about the things he'd loved. Harry had not been to Louis' grave, and he never would.

Instead, he payed his love to Louis by sitting for hours on end in his tiny back garden where he'd planted a little apple tree. Around the tree he'd planted wildflower seeds, and was waiting for spring so that they'd grow. He'd taken a knife and engraved Louis' name in the tree's trunk, and around the bare branches, he'd entwined the yellow ribbon. The whole garden was for Louis; a garden for a boy who'd never had the chance to dance barefoot on the grass or plant flowers or run his fingers through the pond water or just live. 

That secret garden—the prettiest Harry could make of it—was Louis' heart.

In it were butterflies, birds full of song, sunlight that shone and warmed everything eternally. It was Louis' heart Harry was looking after, and still he was the only one who listened to its beating.

"So will you?" Lilly-Ann pleaded, just as she'd spent the last hour doing, "You can't let him down, not after everything he'd done. You must dance with someone else who'll Odette or forget about the show altoget—"

"No!" Harry snapped at her, "No. That show meant everything to him. I'll dance for him, even if it kills me, I will." He paused for a moment, vicious green eyes falling away from the faces who watched. "But.. I can't dance with anyone but him. With anyone but her. They're the only people in the world who have my heart, and I can barely stand without it."

Angela stepped up, her voice far too harsh when she said, "Of course you can, foolish boy. You're from a family of world famous Ballerinas. There is no one better than you. You can dance, Harry Styles. You can dance."

Harry looked at her, seething at the sight of them all, "You don't understand! I'm not like all of you, I can't do what you do. I can't dance without love. Love is the only thing I dance for and the only thing that guides me. To dance without a heart is like breathing with no air. It isn't possible for someone like me."

No one replied for a long while where Harry calmed himself. His head was spinning for some reason, and he had a headache. Perhaps his blurred thoughts were what made him finally say, "I'll dance with you, Lil'. I don't have a choice. I either dance with you or the show is cancelled. Again."

Lilly-Ann bent down to him to catch his eye; he looked at her. He'd always been like an older brother to her, ever since she could remember. He'd helped her get rid of bullies, helped her balance her school life with Ballet, had gone out of his way in giving her extra lessons to calm her nerves.. He'd changed her world and given her the life she dreamed of having, and it was finally her turn to give everything back.   
"I won't let you down." she said, "As for Rosaline and Louis; I'll dance better than I ever did before. I'll dance until I fall if I must, I'll make this show my very being. We'll give them the best tribute you could ever imagine so all I need is for you to trust me."

Harry watched her. His expression had calmed, but he did not smile. Louis, even if he'd never know it, had been the first to make the King of Ballet smile since Rosaline had passed, but he'd been the last, as well.

"Alright." Harry said, standing up. His leg clicked and he grunted before kicking back into place.

*

And before they knew it, Harry was dressed in a Prince's attire, Lilly-Ann wore a dress of white feathers, one Louis should have been wearing, with a tiara that Louis had been ecstatic to wear, and holding a ribbon, just as Louis had held his.

Harry turned away from her to the curtain. He opened it, just the slightest bit, and peered through the opening gap. The theatre was full of people, every seat taken by women in ballroom dresses, holding fizzing champagne, and men in fitted suits who smiled at their companions. They were all here to see the Swan Princess, and Harry couldn't help but feel like an imposter was wearing the pretty white dress and satin slippers.

"How many people are there?" Lilly-Ann asked, tiptoeing up to Harry on her toes while clipping the tiara to her head.

Harry looked her up and down, stomach twisting. "Booked full, as always."

"Of course, they're here for you; I'd expect nothing less. Everyone is here to see the King of Ballet."

"This is not my show." Harry said.

Lilly-Ann said no more after that.

After a long while of preparing, yelling, stressing and running around, the lights went low, and Harry—who stood on the stage to bow alongside Lilly-Ann and the other ballerinas—heard the crowd settle in their seats. He'd heard this sound a thousand times, from when he'd been in the crowds and watched his parents dance to when he himself had performed. The sound was not knew to him, yet this time it sent fear to poison his whole body until he was sure his vision was going blurry.

The curtain before them lifted and the crowd clapped and raised their champagne. Harry's vision was indeed blurry. The orchestra in the pit below was the clearest thing he could see, but even then he saw no faces, just shapes. He closed his eyes, tipped his body forward and bowed.

"You can do it." he heard Lilly-Ann whisper beside him. "For them."

And then, the show began.

Music in the orchestra played the songs perfectly, but it lacked the melody Harry knew would have been there if only he'd have been watching Louis instead of Lilly-Ann. She danced better than he'd ever seen her; perfect steps, perfect pose, perfect everything. The crowd was captivated by her beauty, by the way her body melted to the song and submitted itself to every move she offered. She had the grace of a prima ballerina for sure, and the heart of a princess, and that was all a person needed to fall for her that night.

Harry had danced his part in the same way. There had not been a single slip, his prosthetics had held up just as they had the times before, and he'd danced just as well as he ever had. That, at the very least, was what the crowd saw and needed to whisper ' _He's the King'_  to each other over and over, but the King didn't see himself as they did.

He was on the verge of tears from the start, but those who knew him well wouldn't have expected anything less. He'd treasured Louis with his entire being, to not cry now would be impossible for anyone in his position. He'd danced with no confidence. He didn't lift his head and hold it there, but looked down at the ground or at the ceiling or anywhere where the crowds were not. His movements were unsure, as if he'd not been the one to rehearse the same step for days on end until he'd perfected it. He was a King to the crowd, but no one to himself—to Louis, and it angered him so much.

He stepped behind the curtain to the left of the stage and wiped his eyes with a hand. Angela and Robin were there to pat him on the back and praise him and give him the love he needed. He was doing well, and if Rosaline and Louis could see him now, they'd be so incredibly proud.

"I hate this.." He said to them, sitting down on a costume box. A woman offered him a bottle of water which he took a long drink out of as if the water could magically turn into alcohol. "I hate this so much.."

"I'm so proud of you." Angela said, and it was a surprise to hear the words come from her mouth. They didn't seem to fit. "Only the ending remains; the death of Odette which is now, and the Prince's ending."

"I can't do this anymore, I'm making a fool of myself and I'm ruining the show." He teared up again but Robin grabbed him and pulled him into a hug.

"My boy, you've got the world mesmerised. Keep going. Didn't you say that you'd dance for them even if it'd kill you on the way? Where's the boy who said that, eh?"

Harry paused. He looked at the stage to see the Swan Princess fall gracefully onto the ground, twirling around on herself until she lay completely still.

It brought pain to Harry's heart, so much that he thought it would burst.   
"I'm _here_." He said, standing up and turning to the curtain. His face only showed anger now, simmering deep within himself and rising as fast as he breathed. He looked back at Robin with eyes he'd never given anyone before. They were mourning, yet electrifying with hatred and regret. "I'm _here_. I've _always_ been here."

And then he ran out on the stage, jumping and turning around on himself as if God had created him especially for this. He'd been sculpted by the Heavens themselves, and nothing in the world—no ballerina nor angel—would ever have been more captivating than Harry.

But his eyes were streaming in tears, his face screwed in a pain burning more than arson. He danced with a heart that was cracked open and bleeding, with lungs that breathed in flames not air, and his body was ablaze upon that stage. No, it truly was on fire, he was sure of it. There was a pain in his thigh that sent shockwaves up his spine and into his arm. It crackled through is nape and into his brain making the world spin. He did not see where he danced, but the King danced nonetheless. It was almost over; almost time for him to sit on the floor and pretend he was dead. After that, it would all be over.

He'd leave town and go the cottage on the moors. He'd leave this life behind, the memories it held, and start a new one by himself. He'd make a new garden for Louis, larger than the last—God, he had the whole moors to make into the boy's heaven. Harry would live with Louis' heart around him; he'd work on the farm and milk the baby lambs that Louis had wanted to look after so much. He would sit in the bath and watch his rubber duck and just remember the way Louis had played with it, too.

He'd have the world to himself, and he'd never return to this place. He'd lived for Rosaline once, had lived for Louis after, and he decided then that he'd live for them eternally.

But there was one thought in his mind that—at that moment—made him stumble and catch himself. One horrid thought that ran around in his brain and tormented him. It tore his mind up, blurred his vision, cut his heart like paper cuts running through it.

And that thought was Louis' voice saying the only thing it desired to say then, ' _You'll regret keeping secrets_ '

'It was you, wasn't it?' Harry thought as he danced on that stage in front of hundreds. He looked at the light which was supposed to be on him, but he didn't see it as brightly as it shone. 'Louis? You were my secret.'

And he was right. Louis had called out to Harry, but he'd not reacted just as others had not. Louis had known that only Harry could have done _something_ to save him from his Mother, but Harry hadn't, and now the little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters was dead.

Harry jumped in the air, stumbled on his feet and turned around. Uncountable eyes were fixed on the King, but he saw none. 'You were right, I regret it. I regret keeping you a secret.'

He landed on the ground once again and let his body fall to the floor in the centre of the stage. He turned to his hand, prosthetic fingers watching back like some horrid curse that had infiltrated his body. And the King of Ballet's beautiful green eyes were streaming with tears, his lips as pink as rose leaves parting and bleeding with the amount of times he'd bit into them. Just before he curled up on himself, as the curtain began to fall, Harry said,

"I wish I'd never kept you a secret."

The curtain touched the ground, and beyond it, hundreds of people stood to applaud. Their joy sent vibrations through the floor, their whistles rang like wedding bells in the air, and they cried out for an encore as did everyone who watched the King.

But Harry, from the darkness of the stage, remained curled up over himself. After a moment of whispering and calling to him, and looking at one another questioningly, the Ballet crew stepped aside to let Angela walk up to him. She grabbed his shoulder, "Harry, I told you to stay, but not this long—"

And then, she turned him around.

Harry had been a child to watch the world turn and dance his way through life. He'd been a boy who'd found love in a girl that shared his heart and passion. He'd found a boy who'd been covered in plasters and who'd piqued his interest from the moment their eyes had met. Harry had been a boy to breakdown night after night over a horrid pain in his leg until it was removed, but who'd gone against it to follow what he loved more than anything in the world. He'd lost an arm over it. Everything had come at him, but he was still just a boy looking for love.

And in the end, after everything he'd been through, his broken heart had killed him.

*

*

**Fin.**

I hope that you enjoyed this tragedy as much as I enjoyed writing it. There are other books with happier endings on my profile if you'd like something happier. 

You may be wondering if this really is the end, if it all ends just as quickly as it started, but it does. Harry wondered the same thing about Louis, that this couldn't possibly be the end because so much had been left unanswered. Death is not something slow and wonderful; it's fleeting. Death is not like in fairytales—it doesn't wait for happiness and resolution. Harry and Louis' lives ended as fast as they'd started, and it was so quick that even they didn't expect it.

 **The characters follow those in the original story of Swan Lake.**  
\- Louis is Odette, eternally trapped by his Mother in his home at night, but by day he is free. Odette was eternally trapped as a swan from Von Rothbart's curse, but free by night.  
\- Mother is Von Rothbart, who obsessed over Odette such as Mother obsessed over Louis.  
\- Harry is Prince Seigfried, who in the beginning is found to be looking for a woman to marry. None please him until he meets Odette. Afterwards, when asked which woman he favours, the Prince says 'none'. Harry was in the same situation: he was intrigued by no one until he found Louis, and afterwards, he would dance with no one else.  
\- Shawn is Odile, but unlike Odile who chased the Prince's love, Shawn chased Louis'.  
\- In the final act of the Ballet, Odette and the Prince both died for Love's sake and because the world was too unkind.   
Louis died because Mother's obsession prevented him from loving, just as Odette's curse to be a swan prevented her. Harry died for Love and Love alone; as did the Prince who died for Odette.

*

**Please tell me what you thought of the story, I'd mean so much to me if you could. Thank you! And if you did enjoy it, please share it on social media, it takes two seconds to do which is nothing compared to the time I've taken to write this book and do the art. Thank you so much.**

**More stories are available on my profile, and more stories shall come.**

All I can say for now is thank you a million times over for giving this book love, and thank you for giving the people in it your love, as well. They needed it.

_This is the final curtain call,  
All of my heart, Lucy._

 

_Written in memory of the Little boy in Mickey Mouse plasters and the King of Ballet.  
01/11/94 and 24/12/94_

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone! I hope that you will enjoy/are enjoying this story, it is a pleasure to write it for you.  
> Also, I'm an actual writer so it should be alright for you x), and there will be art in this book (by me as well).
> 
> I hope you have your dancing shoes on, because the curtain will rise.
> 
> Please share this book on social media so that more people can discover it, thank you, it would make me so so grateful! (really, you don't know this but it makes a huge difference)  
> Swan Lake is also available on wattpad with the same title. "Swan Lake - Larry Stylinson" by LHNameless  
> Written with my love, Lucy


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